Our results are sometimes counterintuitive. For instance, we expected the flood to have affected primarily poorer households, but the data do not show a difference in poverty level (measured by the annual expenditure of households) between the affected households and those that were not affected by the flood. In the informal settlements of Accra, even relatively well-off households bore the consequences of the flood. This is probably due to the magnitude of the event, which affected even places considered relatively safe, but it is also due to tenure arrangements that make it difficult for people to move away from risks, even when they are not living in poverty.
This does not mean that the flood did not affect poor people disproportionally. Indeed, while poorer households lost less than their richer neighbors in absolute terms, they were much more affected in relative terms, when losses are compared with annual income.
Poorer households are over-represented among the most severely affected households: the poorest households (in the bottom quarter of the population in terms of annual expenditure) are 60 percent more likely than the overall population to report losses larger than 10 percent of their annual expenditure.
Two years after the flood, 31 percent of affected households report that they have not recovered yet. And as we expected, poorer households struggle more to recover. But the main reasons why recovery is more challenging for them is not their lower income per se, but everything that comes with lower income: less savings, income sources that are less stable, limited access to borrowing opportunity, less support from friends and family, and of course the fact that poor people experience larger (relative) losses.
This means that people who are not living in poverty before the flood, but who have little access to support, may be as unable to recover by themselves as poorer people, and they may also need support to avoid falling into a poverty trap. From a policy perspective, the conclusion is that post-disaster programs need to be designed to identify and target low-resilience households, even if they are not poor in monetary terms before the disaster.
These results also suggest that building resilience requires more than just growing incomes. Financial inclusion, labor regulations, and social protection systems are important building blocks of a more resilient society—a society where Sarah and her neighbors may experience a major flood without seeing their life prospects permanently altered.