Mauritania fertile ground for Arab donors

IRIN: Drought-prone, chronically hungry Mauritania, with the help of the UN, is reaching out to Arab donors, encouraging them to reach beyond their customary role in development and engage in humanitarian response.

Traditional humanitarian donors are largely members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC). But non-traditional, non-DAC donors’ contributions to humanitarian financing have been increasing in recent years. And with many Western donors cutting budgets amid fears of another recession, the Gulf region has gained influence in aid, especially in countries with large Muslim populations.

In early February, a group of Arab donors visited the food-insecure regions of Brakna and Gorgol, a trip organized by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Gogol and Brakna are severely food insecure. According to the most recent study, from December 2011, acute malnutrition rates surpassed the World Health Organization’s emergency threshold, at 11.7 percent in Gorgol and 12.5 percent in Brakna.

The World Food Programme (WFP), with its partner NGO Au Secours, is targeting 7,000 households across the region with cash transfers of 20,000 ouguiyas per month. It has 120 households on its books in Guosse Village in Brakna.

Chief of Guosse, Sidi Brahim Ould Samba, told IRIN his village, “like so many others, lacks everything… access to water, education and health." Even with ongoing help from the government, WFP, NGOs and other donors, it is never enough to move them much beyond survival, he said...

A valley in Mauritania, shot by c.hug, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license 

Mauritania reeling from unprecedented flooding

IRIN: Weeks of heavy rains that began in mid-August have left much of Mauritania's capital city, Nouakchott, and six of the surrounding regions under water, creating "unprecedented" damage according to the Department of Civil Protection.

Some areas have seen as much as 35 percent more rainfall than average, according to the National Meteorological Office.

More than 5,600 people have been affected by the flooding, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says that 2,305 people have been displaced and at least eight people have died.

The worst-affected communities are in the department of Moudjeria, in Tagant, south-central Mauritania, where the Mauritanian Red Crescent Society (MRCS) reports that 40 percent of families have lost their homes.

In addition to the estimated 525 homes that were washed away or collapsed, schools, market places, health centres and other public buildings have been destroyed by water damage. Many roads have become impassable and entire neighbourhoods in some regions remain inaccessible.

In parts of the southern agricultural zone, fields have been flooded, which the World Food Programme (WFP) warns could affect harvests.

An aerial view of Atar, Mauritania, shot by John Atherton, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Insuring against dry days in Africa

IRIN: Soaring temperatures and the severity of this year’s drought have taken some by surprise in southeastern and eastern Mauritania. When rains are normal people only dip into their cereal reserves from June/July in the following year, but in mid-2012 people have already been without food for more than three months, and many pastoralists in the region have lost the animals on which they depend for a living.

Livestock farming is the second biggest export earner so the loss extends to the national purse.

Mauritania is poor - among the bottom 30 in the UN Human Development index - and recently asked for US$95 million to help respond to the crisis. But if it had signed up for a pooled drought risk insurance facility, it could have had up to $30 million to help respond within weeks after the weak rainy season ended in October 2011, said the World Food Programme (WFP).

In any given year a thin rainy season in Mauritania is probable, but this cannot be predicted with certainty says WFP, which is helping the African Union (AU) set up the Africa Risk Capacity (ARC) insurance and early response facility. The objective is that the insurance will pay out when an extreme event occurs - in this case drought - rather than in the case of persistent or localized arid events that occur often or even every year.

By linking insurance payouts to effective response plans, ARC aims to help African governments reduce the negative impact of droughts on the lives and livelihoods of the vulnerable, while decreasing reliance on external aid. "We are still in the design phase, and if all goes well we hope to establish the ARC in mid-2013 or so," said Joanna Syroka, programme director of the project...

The Sahara Desert in Mauritania, shot by Annabel Symington, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Mauritania could lose its capital to the sea

Med Abderrahmane in IPS: For the past five years, water has been seeping out of the ground beneath parts of Nouakchott, undermining foundations and transforming some areas of the Mauritanian capital into uninhabitable marshes. Tabara Gaye, a widow living in the Socogim PS neighbourhood of this coastal city, told IPS that her neighbours' house collapsed on Jun. 20. She is demanding urgent help from the government before this year's rainy season to pay for pumps and the cost of building embankments against the rising waters.

In 2007, limited flooding was observed in several places during the rainy season. But in January 2011, residents were forced to flee their homes when water began invading several neighbourhoods, including Socogim, Bagdad, Sebkha and Las Palmas. Murmurs of discontent gained strength until the clamour for compensation from the government and private developers who laid out the now-flooded sites spurred the government to act.

Mauritanian president Mohamed Abdelaziz personally visited the sites in April and set up an inter-ministerial committee to look into the problem, but the committee is yet to report back. Retiree Moktar Kane, a victim of the flooding, says, "I spent 35 millions ouguiyas (around 138,000 dollars), to purchase a flood-prone plot. My neighbours and I, a total of 476 families, need a drain to drain waste water and runoff… or we want substantial compensation."

Compensation for Kane and his neighbours is out of the question, according to the developers, Iskan (the name means housing in Arabic). "The lots were allocated in 1982, and the water table then was at two metres," says Iskan's technical director, Med Ali. "All of Nouakchott finds itself below the water table. Only the government can settle this."

Recent studies by the government suggest that nearly 80 percent of the overall surface area of Nouakchott could be submerged in less than a decade – in 20 years at most. One scenario predicts the disappearance of the city by around 2050. The director of environmental services, Ould Lefdal, explains it simply, "Nouakchott is located in a depression 50 centimetres below sea level. The sea is advancing towards the city at a rate of 25 metres per year."...

The fishing port in Nouakchott, shot by Hugues, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Mauritania plants trees to hold back desert

Reuters: Mauritania has launched a tree-planting program aimed at protecting its capital from the advancing desert and coastal erosion, a project that could eventually extend thousands of kilometers across Africa.

President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz on Saturday planted the first of some 2 million trees that are meant to form a "green belt" around the capital, Nouakchott, and curb erosion elsewhere in the desert nation that straddles black and Arab Africa.

"The aim of this green belt is to stop the advancing desert and stop encroachment by the sea, which is threatening the town with floods," Ba Housseynou Hammadi, minister for the environment and sustainable development, said.

"This belt will also play an economic role. Some of the trees that have been chosen can be used for firewood. Others will produce gum acacia, which is (a natural gum) sought after for pharmaceutical products," Hammadi added….

Sand dunes advancing on Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. Shot by Georg Gerster, NASA

Africa's water most precarious, Iceland best-study

Alister Doyle in Reuters: African nations led by Somalia, Mauritania and Sudan have the most precarious water supplies in the world while Iceland has the best, according to a survey on Thursday that aims to alert companies to investment risks.

The ranking, compiled by British-based risk consultancy Maplecroft, said climate change and a rising world population meant that stresses on supplies would be of increasing concern in coming decades for uses from farming to industry.

A "water security risk index" of 165 nations found African and Asian nations had the most vulnerable supplies, judged by factors including access to drinking water, per capita demand and dependence on rivers that first flow through other nations. Somalia, where just 30 percent of the population has clean drinking water, topped the list above Mauritania, Sudan, Niger, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkmenistan and Syria.

At the other end of the scale, rain-soaked Iceland had the most secure supplies, slightly better than Norway and New Zealand….

Aerial view of Sarax Darandoole in Somalia, shot by Simisa, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license