**Author details**

*Natural Hazards - Risk, Exposure, Response, and Resilience*

off-farm income activities should also be contemplated.

natural hazards.

increases by 23.64 times.

**4. Conclusion**

effects of the disasters, it will help them to make preparedness part of their lives according to the disaster management options available to them. Over time, experience in managing (especially long term) shocks becomes an asset, as victims plough back these experiences into strategies aimed at preventing, mitigating, coping or resisting similar (and even dissimilar) shocks in the future. Similar contentions have been raised in the topical literature by [31, 32]. One can therefore conclude that experience with disasters can be quite robust in determining the management practices that victims (especially in developing countries) adopt to deal with

In an area where people roughly share the same way of life, occupation and are subjected to similar shocks, they are likely to employ similar coping strategies when hazards strike as response opportunities and available coping mechanisms are relatively homogeneous [27]. This probably explains why in the research area, the main occupation of the household head affected their household coping strategies. Improving agricultural techniques can therefore enhance the coping capacities of our sampled households to future floods. Improving education to enhance access to

Though not significant, belonging to a social group or network showed the strongest contribution to the use of mainly informal disaster coping strategies in this study (B = 18.098, *P* > 0.05). Therefore, the more networks a household head belongs to, the more the household is going to rely mainly on disaster coping strategies to handle disaster effects. This therefore suggests that households who belong to groups or networks are likely to dissipate risks through livelihood diversification. This aligns with the findings of [31] who explained appropriate forms of social capital especially belonging to networks usually appear to have the potential to aid rural income generation as well as reduce vulnerability to livelihood shocks of poor households. Thus for any additional group that the household head joins, the probability that the household will employ mainly informal disaster coping strategies

The probability of the Wald statistics for the variables age and educational level for instance (22.708 and 6.401 respectively) suggests that the disaster victims who are older and more educated are likely to move away from using mainly informal risk management mechanisms to both informal and formal mechanisms. The negative coefficient on education leads us to hypothesize that the more educated a household head is, the more he/she is likely to use formal than informal instruments in managing disasters. These results however contradict the findings in the topical case studies [26, 27, 32]. About 34 for instance in his work in India found education to be a very cost-effective strategy for influencing and implementing schooling decisions in poor households in India. A probable explanation for this is the gener-

Our research demonstrates that Cameroon has diverse geo-ecological zones with climate-related hazards and disasters that are specific to some while others cut across. Through a comparative analysis, we differentiate that the Sudano-Sahelian zone is characterized by severe droughts and very deadly floods in both the urban and rural settings while the Western highlands are typified by floods in both the urban and rural settings as well. Further, we gained insights into the different drivers of household determinants of coping with droughts and floods in both geo-ecological zones. Respondents identified Informal coping mechanisms as their major fallback positions and include amongst others; reducing their household

ally low levels of education observed in the Cameroon case study.

**180**

Theobald Mue Nji1 and Roland Azibo Balgah<sup>2</sup> \*

1 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Management Sciences, University of Buea, Cameroon

2 College of Technology, The University of Bamenda, Cameroon

\*Address all correspondence to: balgahroland@gmail.com, balgazib@yahoo.com

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
