Coping strategies with floods in Bangladesh: an empirical study

Abstract

In the time of the flooding, rural people in Bangladesh suffer from the lingering effects of labor market disruption and income deficiency. This study shows a model based analysis on the research question, ‘what coping strategies are followed by the flooded households in Bangladesh and how?’. Data are collected through a three stage stratified random sampling technique on 595 flooded and rural households’. Survey is carried out aftermath of the flood in the year 2005, from four different districts in Bangladesh. A major proportion of households are found to borrow money or resources from informal sources, such as nearby shops or the pharmacy, friends or relatives, or local money lenders, to buy food items and other essentials. A censored tobit model analysis shows that households initiate coping with borrowing money after the realization of floods, and gradually lead to cope with savings and selling assets as the duration of flood increases.