that the people vulnerable to this type are those living in flood-prone areas and areas likely to experience the high sea-level rise, drier conditions, storms. Reducing such vulnerability simply means moving people away from such locations or improving the environmental and infrastructural planning to avoid physical damage during climate hazards. This type of vulnerability can also be curbed through more proper environmental and infrastructural planning, primarily commercial and residential buildings.
You need to be taught where it starts. If I am not getting workshops to inform me, how do I know? It is like HIV/AIDs, for example, sorry to go out of topic but I’m just trying to make comments about comparisons in the past. With HIV and AIDS, people were not educated about it, and you know, it was when people started teaching people about HIV that everyone knew about it. With floods, not that we can prevent them from happening, but we can try. For example, some people have drainage systems in their homes. So, even when floods come, they can know how to redirect the water, exactly. We are not educated about it. There are no wishes about that. Maybe if we can have those types of things. Women are smart these days [FGD, K3(1)].
Lack of education limits the women's awareness of what it entails to secure household insurance. Insurance policies are very useful securities against the time of disaster. Despite the fact that many of the women were living hand to mouth and might not have been able to afford the insurance policy, it seems crucial for them to be aware of such policies. Many participants reported not knowing what household insurance entails. A participant in KwaMashu expressed some comments on the status of the experiences of other Black women regarding household insurance. She commented as follows:
I do not think people are even educated about that because, you know, if you have household insurance, if something does get damaged too because of floods or thunderstorms, you can get insurance on that. Most Black people do not have insurance policies. Black people are not educated about that. So, you need someone who may be from the government that can educate people on that and how to go about how it.
Because I feel as if when there is a flood, the only thing that they ever think of in this life is their personal belongings. And you ask me. These floods happen when people are at work. The things that happen, it is a lot [FGD, K3(1)].
Education is also about access to information, as well as the ability to understand and utilise available vital information at one's disposal. We live in a digital age where information on events and happenings is crucial to keeping one alert and vigilant with happenings in the world.
The information provides a sense of security and enhances one's adaptive capacity.
Information capable of boosting one's security and, consequently, enhancing adaptive capacity includes information on early disaster warnings, weather or climate forecasts, flood predictions, and flood preventive and management measures.
Getting information on early disaster warnings is quite vital to helping people prepare for the eventuality of a flood. Early disaster warnings include those issued by the government's Department of Environment and are aimed at informing citizens of any disasters forecast.
However, it becomes a challenge if people, due to a lack of awareness or lack of access to sources of information, are left behind on such a forecast. It deprives them of the chance to prepare and put preventive measures in place to evade or reduce the possible damages of any disaster. As a participant in KwaMashu explained:
Some people are not even aware… some people are not aware at all. Some people get called while at work, and they would be like, ‘Oh, my God. I have to go back home’. I just do not find the right way to describe it. I feel as if everything goes around Education. That is any form of education. [FGD, K3(1)]
It is understandable that in remote villages, access to information can be a challenge simply because there is no access to means of such information. We are living in a digital age where most information is passed through social media, digital television, and other mediums that make use of the internet. Access to these mediums could be a challenge to older women in the interior villages. To address such challenge, a participant from KwaMashu suggested reverting to the local means of disseminating information to villagers. She suggested:
At wards, at council wards, they have councillors. They have cars that have those announcements' machinery. They can go around and announce. When they want us to come and vote, they take out the car: “We are going to be having a voting station, come around and vote.” Why don't they do that on specific issues? Yeah, because they can announce other irrelevant things. Why cannot they not do that equally for important things? [FGD, K4(1)]
While some participants had no clue how the challenge of access to information in the rural areas can be addressed, some participants who were enlightened and formally educated had quite exciting suggestions. Drawing from history and past experiences, participants suggested that in the village settings, information regarding flood forecasts could be disseminated to parents through schools. Information, maybe in the form of information leaflets, could be distributed at schools to children who would take them home to their parents. Some parents noted that this strategy worked quite well for them in the past. One participant in KwaMashu
(K3 (1) noted that conveying information to parents through their children has a potential to be effective in awareness creation. According to her, this is because parents, especially mothers, are more likely regard any information or notice paper that children bring home from school as important. She stated:
The best place you could ever convey a message in a village is through school. Because that is how some of us get information; that is how some of us are able to know that something is happening in the area… As soon as the child returns home, we are going to see this attachment on their homework [referring to issuing out announcement pamphlets to pupils]. You would be like, “What is this?” If you are a parent, you have to see the homework. Even if you do not see the homework, your child will inform you about it. When you hear something from a child, then you know it is really serious.
[FGD, K3(1)]
She further reiterated:
It is just a matter of us being strategic about things, sitting people down, telling them properly, we are going to do this, we are not going to do this, and stuff like that. I feel the best thing… communication is going to convey messages, especially in rural areas.
In our community, that is how things are done. My community in a rural area is developing. It recently just got electricity. So, people do have television; they do have radios, but they still believe the old news travelling system of conveying messages through kids from school. Because I do not want to lie to you, you see, when you hear something from a kid, you know it is really serious. You take it seriously because you know it has been conveyed by the people that were there and gave them the information [FGD, K3(1)]