Disaster risk management and sustainable development in selected African countries

Abstract

Experts had reiterated that sustainable development is aimed at meeting the needs of the present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This had made every continent to focus on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), officially known as transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Among the agenda are the issues on disaster management. This study examined the effect of disaster-risk management on sustainable development in Africa for the year 2013 due to limited data availability. Data sourced from World Bank data base were analyzed using Ordinary Least Square (OLS), since the data were cross-sectional in nature. The result showed that disaster-risk reduction is significantly meaningful in African region both directly as it improves the level of sustainable development and indirectly when apply to mineral extraction and other sections that give income to Africa countries. The results also showed that financial development, political stability and higher income also improved the level of sustainable development in Africa, but not significant. We therefore recommended that effective disaster management should not only directly apply to African countries, but should also be applied indirectly to areas of extractive activities in African region.