Flood events in West Africa have devastating impacts on the lives of people. Additionally, developments such as climate change, settlement expansion into flood-prone areas, and modification of rivers are expected to increase flood risk in the future. Policy documents have issued calls for conducting local risk assessments and understanding disaster risk in diverse aspects, leading to an increase in such research. Similarly, in a shift from flood protection to flood risk management, the consideration of various dimensions of flood risk, the necessity of addressing flood risk through an integrated strategy containing structural and non-structural measures, and the presence of residual risk are critical perspectives raised. However, the notion of “residual risk” remains yet to be taken up in flood risk management-related academic literature. This systematic review seeks to approach the notion of residual risk by reviewing information on flood impacts, common measures, and recommendations in academic literature. The review reveals various dimensions of impacts from residual flood risk aside from material damage, in particular, health impacts and economic losses. Infrastructural measures were a dominant category of measures before and after flood events and in recommendations, despite their shortcomings. Also, spatial planning interventions, a more participatory and inclusive governance approach, including local knowledge, sensitisation, and early warning systems, were deemed critical. In the absence of widespread access to insurance schemes, support from social networks after flood events emerged as the most frequent measure. This finding calls for in-depth assessments of those networks and research on potential complementary formal risk transfer mechanisms.

In many West African river basins, households regularly experience floods and the associated impacts. In the absence of widely accessible formal risk transfer mechanisms (e.g., insurance), households often have to cope with financial impacts. Only a few studies have explored the financial effects of floods on agriculture-dependent households in the region and the role formal and informal risk transfer plays in their mitigation. This study addresses this gap, explores flood impacts with financial implications for households, and researches the existing strategies to mitigate them. Moreover, it aims to better understand how different measures influence the recovery process. The study draws on primary data from a household survey (n = 744) in the Lower Mono River basin, combined with stakeholder workshops and semi-structured interviews, and applies a generalized linear model to the survey data. The results reveal four flood impact types with financial implications: agricultural, material, health, and trade. Moreover, a shortened recovery time is significantly associated with assistance from savings groups and cooperatives—groups originally not formed to help during floods. In light of the severe and frequent flood impacts, effective and publicly accepted adaptation measures are needed to enable favorable conditions for creating sustainable and accessible risk transfer mechanisms.