Evaluation of Flood Management Policies in the City of Yagoua (Far-North Region, Cameroon)

For several decades, be it the equatorial or tropical zone, the climatic variability helping, the Cameroonian cities are subjected to the phenomenon of flooding. Located at 10°20' and 11°35' north latitude at 14°55' and 15°10' east longitude, Yagoua, a locality with a tropical Sudano-sahelian climate, is no exception about this situation since each rainy season, it registers cases of temporary stagnation and prolonged water. Floods here are becoming more and more an urban problem. This contribution aims to highlight the inconsistency of the fitting out policies undertaken in terms of sanitation of the urban perimeter. The hypothesis suggests that the cumulative actions of the institutional actors, their partners and the local populations in net growth, involved in the prevention and the direct management of this water disaster, seem to suffer from a lack of anticipation in the matter and make the environment more vulnerable. Through a methodology based on: documentary research in academic institutions, the analysis of annual reports and interviews with officials of technical and administrative services (departmental delegations of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development; that of the service of meteorology of transport, urban planning services, hygiene and health services of the council), the participative approach, the direct field observations, surveys of 279 households, it appears the results according to which: due to its flat topography, with almost no slopes (about 0.01%), of annual rainfall values increasingly between 750-1200 mm, Yagoua is a locality exposed to flooding. The various fitting out initiated before, during and after the rainy season by the actors (installation of drainage structures and maintenance of existing ones) do not contribute to reducing the scale of the phenomenon, thereby making the city a place of bad living. Remedying this is simply to encourage the pooling of skills and the regular monitoring of sanitation activities.