Every year heavy rain brings misery and gridlock to west Africa

wave of water,” says Oulimata Sambe. She points out the still-sodden armchairs, muddy wardrobe and the water stain a metre and a half up the wall in her small house in Ngor, a fishing village within Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “I had two grandkids on my bed, I had to evacuate them out of the window,” she adds. Not far away, underpasses on Dakar’s scenic corniche became car-swallowing lakes. Just weeks earlier another downpour had turned quiet streets in Dakar into raging rivers and collapsed a section of motorway. Similar events regularly occur across the region. Recent flooding and landslides also killed eight people in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. In June flooding killed 12 people in Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast. Floods in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, claimed another seven lives. Even when they are not deadly, city floods ruin lives and livelihoods. Storm water recently inundated the biggest textile market in Kano, a city in northern Nigeria, destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of fabrics.