Traders in downtown Kampala find themselves in a bind with the terrible inevitability of the November rains exacting a high toll in human misery.
Grim predictions are being made with wide-eyed certainty by climate resilience and flooding experts after recent construction activities in flood plains compromised flood management measures in and around Nakivubo.
The financial impact incurred by weather-related damage to properties and possessions in Kampala’s Central Business District (CBD) stands as an ugly reminder of Mother Nature’s rage, if not ruthlessness.
Our deepest sympathies are with people who have, through no fault of their own, found themselves in a spot of bother due to rising flood risks.
Our hope is that the growing evidence of the rising threat posed by extreme weather piques interest about climate resilience and climate adaptation.
Ugandans must keep up the pressure on their leaders to take the rising threat level seriously.
The current blame game that technocrats and bureaucrats at City Hall are currently involved in will only do as much. Evidence-based solutions have to be proffered to ensure lightning does not strike twice, if you will. Before talking solutions, a diagnosis of the problem at hand would be much appreciated. Such a diagnosis would doubtlessly show the spending on flood defences is atrociously bad, compounded by human activities such as those that have contrived to narrow the Nakivubo drainage channel.
Also contributing to the bleak prospects assailing traders in Kampala’s CBD is the poor uptake of insurance packages. Yet the insurance industry must assume a central place in the grand scheme of all things climate risk reduction.
Here is why: Empirical evidence suggests that insurance contributes to climate risk reduction by, as one peer reviewed article points out, using risk transfer and by promoting resilience through incentivising safer practices.
Specifically, aside from doing a range of mundane things, including but not limited to providing financial incentives for policyholders to adopt risk-reducing measures, insurers can collaborate with the government on adaptation plans.
Besides risk assessment and modelling, as well as promoting resilience, insurers can also reduce climate risk through education.
Indeed, they can educate policyholders in downtown Kampala on how best to insulate their businesses against climate risks.
Traders in Kampala’s CBD are, of course, not alone in showing a lack of appetite, trust, and poor comprehension of insurance products.
The uptake of insurance products in Uganda remains desperately low, with less than one percent penetration. That works to about a pitiful 500,000 lives insured out of a population of more than 40 million.
One of the ways in which uptake can be improved, at least in downtown Kampala, is through product innovation.
In the global north, it is a common practice to have climate risk insurance provide incentives for risk reduction. This is done by simply rewarding preventive measures with lower insurance premiums.
Evidently, insurance’s capacity to serve as a critical tool for mitigating the financial impacts of climate disasters such as the one recently witnessed in downtown Kampala is not in doubt. The challenge now is to sensitise people who are in, pun unintended, the eye of the storm.