Kenya Devastated by Heavy Rains: Floods, Deaths, and Displacement in East Africa

After a long and devastating drought, heavy rains have hit Kenya in recent months and that has had a devastating effect. At least 179 people are believed to have died in various accidents since March. At worst, writes CNN, 71 people lost their lives when a dam broke in a small town in the Great Rift Valley, which was flooded with water and mud. Another eighty people are reported missing across the country, and two hundred thousand have left their homes.

Many others were forced to do so after President William Ruto ordered the evacuation of flood-prone areas on April 30, mobilizing the army. School-aged children will miss at least a week of lessons after the government postponed the restart of the school year as many institutions are unsafe. Finally, the bad weather also affected the tourism sector (the main source of foreign currency along with agriculture and currency): according to AFPa hundred visitors are lost in the Maasai Mara reserve due to river flooding.

The situation is not very different in neighboring countries, where the El Niño meteorological phenomenon, which began in mid-2023 and is expected to last until May, is putting pressure on change climate Tanzania recorded 155 deaths due to floods and landslides, in Burundi around 96 thousand inhabitants were displaced by bad weather and Uganda was also hit by strong storms.

A report by the NGO Human Rights Watch stable that the Kenyan government has not taken adequate measures to avoid these disasters, which have most affected the poor neighborhoods of the capital Nairobi, which are more fragile and densely populated, with less solid buildings and sewerage and plumbing services extremely bad. One risk is that water-borne diseases such as cholera and diarrhea will now spread among people left homeless.

It’s not just the health effects that are worrying. As writes Le Monde Africa, “the psychological trauma created by the violence of these events and the sense of vulnerability regarding the future in response to climate disasters are not adequately taken into account”. The humanitarian workers interviewed by the newspaper recognize that, with the few means they have, their priority is to “save the bodies, not the spirits”.

However, this “hidden face of climate change worries the World Health Organization”, which emphasized in a 2022 note on “the urgency of preparing to prevent mental disorders related to emergencies” climate”, such as anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies.

Unfortunately, in terms of academic research, there are no studies on this phenomenon in Africa. The only efforts to listen to African communities affected by extreme climate events are given to NGOs. Among the examples that the French newspaper mentioned, that ofA regional initiative for psychosocial support in Zimbabwe, which was launched after the passage of Cyclone Idai in 2019, or the intervention of Doctors Without Borders in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, after a landslide in January around three hundred death One of the fundamental problems is the lack of psychologists. In Burundi, the NGO Psychologists Without Borders is trying to train new experts, in a country where there are five people for 13 million inhabitants.