Community-responsive adaptation to a planning project in Kenya

This paper explores community responsive adaptation (CRA) in light of the description of the flooding challenge in informal settlements, particularly Kibera, Nairobi, providing CRA solutions, results, and outcomes, as well as lessons learned, key takeaways, and recommendations. In 2017, the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) embarked on a new collaboration with academics, local government, and practitioners to build new evidence on how community action and know-how could connect with technical inputs and larger-scale infrastructure planning. Under the project, KDI adopted community participation and co-designed, built, and evaluated public space-based flood adaptation interventions.

The project provides evidence of the delivery, costs, and impacts of flood adaptations that integrate valuable local knowledge through community input. Interventions implemented in selected high-risk and high-exposure areas combine "hard" measures, including constructed flood protection, and "soft" measures, including flood preparedness and financial resilience schemes. The impacts of the interventions are quantified and qualified through household surveys focusing on project intervention sites, control sites, and 2D flood modeling. The household survey collected detailed socio-demographic, hazard, infrastructural, income, etc., over multiple waves in a four-year period over a randomized panel of one thousand five hundred households around the interventions. The project offers critical new evidence on the value of community-responsive adaptation to flooding measures that can inform policy in informal settlements in Nairobi and beyond. It is an interesting case as it focuses on "knowing by doing," i.e., building interventions and understanding them in the research process.