Effect of Flooding on Livelihood of Communities in Muwo District, Mokwa Local Government Area, Niger State, Nigeria

Abstract

Flooding in Nigeria has been reported to affect and render people homeless than any other natural disaster. Muwo district one of the adversely affected districts in Nigeria owing to its geographical location and many other factors. Unfortunately, there is death of literature on the effects of food in the district, therefore this paper was aimed at assessing the effects of flooding on livelihood in the 425 questionnaires were administered and analyzed. Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was used to assess the trend of the occurrence flooding in the past 20 years. Geographic Information systems (GIS) was used to analyze the terrain. The results revealed that among the underlying courses of flooding: 77% of respondents agreed that release of water from Kay dam was the man cause of flooding in the area, while 23% attributed the flooding to excessive rainfall. As evident from the standard precipitation Index, excessive rainfall is not the cause of flooding in the district but the release of water from Kainji dam. The results showed that there was a great less of agricultural products worth millions of Naira. There was a significant increase of loss with an increase in tam size (-0.50) The SPI results indicated that years the 1005 and 2007 recorded the highest amount of rainfall ich d very wat years. The year 2008 was moderately wet year. The years 2015 and 1088 were found to be moderately dry and extremely dry respectively. The findings indicated that there were 22 near normal years. Migration was found to be the major coping strategies adopted by the communities. The terrain analysis indicated that 639.62sq.ml, 880.83ml and 155.37 sq.ml were found to be highly vulnerable, moderately vulnerable and less vulnerable to flooding