Vivre avec l'Eau (Live with Water) — Community Flood Resilience in Suburban Dakar

Dakar's low-lying peri-urban suburbs flood repeatedly during the rainy season, worsened by unplanned settlement on poorly drained land. The 2013–2017 'Vivre avec l'Eau' (Live with Water) project, led by Senegal's Consortium for Social and Economic Research (CRES) under the UK Aid-funded BRACED programme, targeted roughly 860,000 residents across 10 communes in the Dakar suburbs.

The project combined four types of intervention: about $2.5 million of local drainage infrastructure to cut households' flood exposure; support for community waste collection and recycling to keep drains clear; income-generating activities such as urban gardening and waste recycling; and support for community organisations and contingency planning ahead of the rainy season.

A team of Swiss and Senegalese researchers evaluated the project using a before-after-control-intervention design, surveying 2,911 households at baseline and 2,625 at follow-up, split between treatment and comparison communes. Measuring 'subjective resilience' using an anticipatory/absorptive/adaptive/transformative capacity framework, they found absorptive capacity rose a statistically significant 10.6% and anticipatory capacity rose 4.6%, while adaptive capacity showed no significant change; self-reported flood exposure fell 4.5%.

The evaluation is observational rather than a randomised trial, and gains were concentrated in absorptive and anticipatory capacity rather than the harder-to-shift adaptive dimension. The project's five-year donor grant ended in 2017, and no published evidence documents whether the community structures it built have continued operating since, or whether it was renewed at scale. Senegal has since committed far larger sums (a $155 million World Bank loan for the follow-on PROGEP 2 programme) to the same flood-resilience problem in the same suburbs, suggesting the community-based approach alone was not judged sufficient.