Jesica-akeyo/Nairobi-flood-vulnerability

Data companion to the Second Africa Urban Forum, mapping how affordability, land tenure, and drainage gaps concentrate flood risk in Nairobi's informal settlements. # Flood Vulnerabilities of Nairobi's Informal Settlements ## The question behind the work I attended the Second Africa Urban Forum as a delegate, and the conversation in the room stayed largely at the continental policy level, tenure frameworks, financing architecture, climate adaptation targets. I wanted to build the ground-level companion to that conversation, a data piece that could sit next to the policy language and show exactly which neighbourhoods in Nairobi carry the weight of that policy gap, season after season. ## What I did I pulled figures from a wide spread of sources covering the 2024 flood season, government disaster data, UN agency situation reports, the Kenya Red Cross, public health research, and humanitarian monitoring groups, since each source held only part of the full picture on its own. - Reconciled figures across agencies reporting on different timelines, cross-referencing national displacement and death tolls against county-level breakdowns to confirm the numbers agreed with each other before using them - Compared the 2024 March-to-June flood season against the 2023 October-to-December season side by side, to show whether the year-on-year trend was worsening or holding steady - Built a settlement-level table for Nairobi's five largest informal settlements, pairing each one's estimated population and river exposure with the specific factor driving its vulnerability - Traced the secondary effects of the floods, damaged roads, affected schools, damaged health facilities, and disease outbreaks, since the death toll alone understates the scale of what a flood season actually costs a city - Mapped each data gap directly against the commitments made at the forum, so the numbers and the policy language could sit side by side in one document ## What I found - Nairobi County absorbed 72% of all flood-affected people in Kenya during the 2024 season, despite being one county among the 43 affected nationally - 2024 stands as the deadliest flood y …