By Victoria Wilson |

 

Adabraka is among the communities in Accra’s Odaw River basin that flood with every major rainfall. The June 29 event displaced nearly 48,000 residents across greater Accra. Photo: ModernGhana

Flooding has killed more than 70 people across five West African countries since the rainy season began in, as cities from Accra to Abidjan and Lomé faced some of the heaviest rainfall recorded in recent years. Côte d’Ivoire has recorded at least 59 deaths, the majority in Abidjan. Ghana has confirmed at least 12 following catastrophic floods on June 29th, with seven people still missing. Togo has recorded at least five. Benin and Nigeria have also been affected. The flooding has struck coastal communities with what regional observers describe as unprecedented intensity. The peak of the rainy season has not yet arrived.

The deadliest event was a landslide in Abidjan’s Attécoubé district on the night of June 27th, which killed at least twenty people. Six members of a Guinean family were among those who died when the hillside gave way through the Mossikro neighbourhood, a densely settled slope in one of the city’s most flood-exposed municipalities. Officials confirmed that some of those killed had previously been relocated from that same site. Officials did not explain the conditions under which they had returned.

THE CITIES AND THE WATER

In Accra, approximately 140 millimetres of rain fell on June 29th in a single day, one of the highest single-day volumes recorded in the capital in recent years. Roads and entire neighbourhoods were submerged. Nearly 48,000 residents were displaced. The Greater Accra Regional Fire Command rescued more than 400 people from inundated areas. The worst concentrations of flooding were in the Odaw River basin, communities in Kaneshie, Alajo, Adabraka, and around Kwame Nkrumah Circle, low-lying, densely settled areas whose drainage system was built for a smaller, less densely populated city and has never been comprehensively upgraded. Accra and the neighbouring city of Tema were partially cut off, with submerged roads blocking movement between communities.

In Abidjan, the flooding extended across multiple municipalities. Alongside Attécoubé, Yopougon, Cocody, Bingerville, Songon, and Treichville were all affected, with submerged roads, fallen trees, and structural damage disrupting movement across the city. The Ivorian rainy season typically runs from late May to late July. What is arriving now is not the peak.

 The Mossikro neighbourhood in Attécoubé sits on a hillside that has seen repeated landslides across multiple rainy seasons. Authorities had previously relocated residents from the site before the June 27 collapse. Photo: KOACI

 Streets in Lomé’s central and peri-urban districts were submerged in late June 2026 as heavy rains swept the West African coast. Togo confirmed at least five deaths from the flooding. Photo: MyJoyOnline / Albert Kuzor

WHAT WAS LEFT BEHIND

Attécoubé is among Abidjan’s most densely populated and economically marginalised municipalities. The Mossikro neighbourhood sits on a hillside within it, an area that has experienced repeated landslides and flood events across multiple rainy seasons. After previous disasters, authorities have relocated residents away from the most exposed slopes. Some returned. Officials acknowledged this after the June 27th landslide without detailing the conditions those residents faced when they came back. A Guinean family of six died together in the rubble.

Across West Africa, more than 60 percent of urban dwellers live in informal settlements built on floodplains, drainage corridors, and unstable hillsides. Urban analysts trace this pattern not to individual choices but to structural conditions, colonial planning legacies that concentrated serviced, well-drained land for a small minority; exclusionary land tenure systems that placed formal housing beyond reach for the majority; insufficient public housing investment across the post-independence period; and labour migration driven by rural dispossession. “Democracy in Africa” describes informal settlements as “Africa’s urban reality”, not failures of individual planning, but the predictable consequence of who the planning system was originally designed to serve. Residents relocated after disasters, the organisation documents, frequently return to the same sites because formal housing alternatives remain structurally inaccessible.

The N1 Highway, Spintex Road, and the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange were among the major routes submerged on the night of June 29, cutting off movement across Accra for several hours. Photo: ModernGhana

INFRASTRUCTURE BUILT FOR ANOTHER CITY

Accra’s drainage system was constructed during the colonial period for a much smaller and less densely populated city and has never been comprehensively upgraded. The city has experienced catastrophic flooding for at least 66 years, with the same communities, in the same locations, absorbing the consequences year after year.

The colonial-era planning that structured Accra, Abidjan, Lagos, and other major West African cities introduced zoning patterns that entrenched class-based and race-based separation in access to land, services, and infrastructure. High-ground, well-drained, formally serviced land was reserved for colonial administration. Floodplains, drainage corridors, and exposed hillsides became the land available to everyone else. ModernGhana’s research into Accra’s flooding history found that “entrenched colonial and foreign ideologies still dictate urban planning practice,” a dynamic urban planners and researchers say has never been systematically reversed.

AFTER THE FLOODS

Ghana’s government has mounted an emergency response. President John Mahama released the equivalent of approximately 26 million US dollars from the national Contingency Fund: 200 million cedis for emergency humanitarian assistance and 150 million cedis for flood mitigation infrastructure. He has ordered the demolition of all structures built inside waterways, deployed the armed forces alongside the National Disaster Management Organisation, and declared July 10th and 11th national cleanup days. Following an aerial inspection of affected areas, Mahama pledged to end what he described as Accra’s flooding cycle.

Versions of the same announcement, have been made for at least 66 years. Relief funds are released. Waterways are ordered cleared. Structures are condemned. The drainage system built for a smaller, colonial-era city has not been rebuilt for the one that exists.

In Côte d’Ivoire, where the death toll stands at 59, a comparable public relief response has not been reported in regional coverage.

THE REGION THAT DID NOT CAUSE THIS

ECOWAS member states collectively contribute less than two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. West Africa’s average temperature is rising at one and a half times the global rate. Climate change has made extreme rainfall events across Africa more frequent and more intense, the World Weather Attribution network has found, compounding vulnerabilities in cities where flood infrastructure was never adequate and where resources for early warning and adaptation have remained insufficient.

In April 2026, ECOWAS announced a joint climate adaptation strategy, pledging close to 280 billion euros in regional spending over the coming decade. How that funding will be mobilised, and whether it will reach the drainage corridors and informal settlements where West Africa’s flood deaths consistently occur, has not been detailed.

The drainage systems that failed in late June are the same ones that have failed in the same locations, along the same corridors, for at least 66 years. The rainy season’s peak has not yet arrived.