Enhancing the Disaster Resilience of Cities within the East African Community

Book excerpt: Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2016 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Demographics, Urban Management, Planning, University College London, language: English, abstract: This research seeks to enhance the disaster resilience of cities within the EAC by: (a) developing a data base of acute disasters that are common and likely to occur in cities within the EAC, (b) measuring the resilience of major cities within the EAC to these disasters, and (c) developing a framework for enhancing their resilience to potential hazards. It is important to conduct this study now because the present and projected demographic and geographic changes point to a future of continued: (a) rapid urbanization in developing countries – like the EAC - and (b) escalation in the number of urban disasters. Document review and descriptive research will be used in the study with a sample size of 104 participants being selected from the cities of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, and Mombasa. The collected data will be tested for inter-rater reliability, triangulated and instruments checked for content validity. Both measures of central tendency and measures of variability about the mean will be performed on the collected data.