Nomads turned “settled environmental protection warriors”
In an ironic twist of fate, the Mauritanian oasis of Tenadi, once reclaimed by sands, has come back to life thanks to a handful of nomads who have been forced to settle there by the inexorable advance of the desert. More than 200 families are there now, living from agriculture and cattle rearing around two wells, surrounded by 80 hectares of crops, which are their protection against the onward march of the dunes. It’s a difficult venture, begun 20 years ago by a few families led there by Sidi El Moctar Ould Waled, recipient of the Sasakawa Prize from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2006.
Plantation of prosopsis to halt the advancing desert.
Courtesy United Nations Programme for the Environment (UNEP).
Since 1973, the Sahel and Mauritania in particular, have experienced years of persistent drought, killing 90% of livestock and wiping out the hopes of the population, who have always lived by nomadic cattle rearing over extensive grazing lands, on which they were entirely dependent. The sanding-up of waterholes and the longer journeys that resulted forced the nomads to abandon their livestock farming and adopt a settled life.
The nomads of Tenadi banded together in a cooperative around the oasis of the same name, 5 km north of the Road of Hope at the gateway to the desert. The US$200,000 prize will enable the Tenadi oasis to be consolidated and extended to accommodate new families. A new well and also a water retention pool will have to be sunk. An additional 100 hectares of dunes will be reclaimed by planting new crops, and a nursery of 200,000 plants will be set up. A proportion of them will be distributed to similar projects. Finally, those in charge of the cooperative intend to build a track between the oasis and the main road, which is a necessity in view of the growing population and the increase in its agricultural production at the oasis.
