This study reports on a month-long pilot project conducted in three east African cities (Narok and Kisumu in Kenya, and Moshi in Tanzania) to assess resilience and disaster risk reduction (DRR). The pilot is modelled on the ‘ten essentials’ framework, a check-list of priorities and capabilities necessary for DRR. The goals of the study include: identifying DRR work already being undertaken; making a preliminary assessment of city resilience; and understanding the ‘ten essentials’ in an African context. The ‘ten essentials’ used to assess each city are the following.

Institutional and administrative frameworks: limited capacity and integration meant that none of the cities had specific disaster risk management strategies in place.
Financing and resources: severely restricted, with no dedicated funding available.
Multi-hazard risk assessment: with little-to-no formal data collected at city-level, DRR data is scarce. There are, however, significant levels of informal knowledge.
Infrastructure protection, upgrading and resilience: extremely limited; these cities struggle to address even basic urban infrastructure requirements.
Protecting education and health: water, food and hospital capacity are all vulnerable to drought and flood, though only in the city of Kisumu are services directly vulnerable to flooding.
Building regulations and land use planning: although all have good formal building regulations in place, enforcement is an issue.
Training and public awareness: insufficient in all three study locations.
Environmental protection: links between DRR, climate change and environmental management are only partially understood.
Early warning and response: all the cities are reliant on informal knowledge networks.
Recovery: no formal plans for recovery interventions. Ad-hoc community rebuilding simply reinstates risk.

Overall comment is provided on the resilience analysis for each city, as well as recommendations for progressing the ‘ten essentials’, such as strengthening institutional capacity, infrastructure and data collection/monitoring. Specific suggestions for modifying both the ‘ten essentials’ framework and questionnaire (included in full in the appendix) are also provided.