Standing in the shade of a tree, a farmer looks on with disappointment as one of his cows dies. Beside him, two other animals lie in the sun. One of them continues to blink and moo softly, exhausted. “There is nothing to do,” the man explains to Cheick Ould Alkhalifa, a food security and livelihoods technician with Action Against Hunger, who is trying to straighten it out. “I have nothing to feed it and it will never have the strength to go and fetch water.”
On the road leading to the small town of Aghor in south-east Mauritania, the scene repeats itself endlessly. Ruminants lie on their sides, mostly cows, sometimes camels. Also donkeys. At this time of year they should be grazing on warmer lands on the other side of the border, but the violence that continues to shake neighbouring Mali has left shepherds and flocks stranded here.
The Mbera refugee camp (17 kilometres from Aghor) was already overcrowded with more than 80,000 people, but six months ago the security situation in neighbouring Mali deteriorated sharply, pushing nearly 100,000 people into Mauritania. They are now crowding outside the camp with their flocks, putting unprecedented pressure on the scarce natural resources enjoyed by these villages.
Thousands of Mauritanians who had been living in Mali for a long time have had to return home and share the fate of the refugees, gathered around the few water points in the area and waiting for humanitarian aid to trickle in. They wait at the mercy of multiple diseases that are beginning to take their toll, particularly whooping cough and measles.
The testimonies in these settlements are horrifying. Many want to speak, to try to put words to the unspeakable: “They grabbed the old man from our village and cut him into pieces in front of everyone. We don’t know why,” explains one of them.
“Everyone was going to die of thirst”
The contrast between Aghor and the Mbera camp is striking: on the one hand, a camp that, despite reaching saturation point, is well organised and structured, where there are many shops, schools are functioning as they can and water flows in the shadow of several water towers. On the other, outside the camp, the brutality of an absolute and vital emergency, where some fear that after the animals, it will be the turn of the people to die in this vast desert plain.
Imamy Ould Mohamed Rweikab, head of the village of Aghor, explains: “The village used to have 535 households. Now there are more than 4,500 with refugees and returnees.” His testimony is similar to that of many local residents, who showed incredible solidarity when their population increased almost tenfold. “We had to find a solution quickly because everyone was going to die of thirst. That’s why we put the Karama well into operation,” says the village head.
Karama is the name of a consortium of NGOs led by Action Against Hunger and funded by the European Union that works on projects related to food security, nutrition, education, access to water, hygiene and sanitation. One of the partners in this project rehabilitated and put back into operation a well to irrigate a vegetable garden, thus offering the population the prospect of access to new means of livelihood and food. In addition, with European funding, a water network was built so that this well could supply water to the refugee camp.
Shanti Moratti, director of Action Against Hunger in Mauritania, explains: “This is a place where we were planning long-term development. However, with this new emergency, we have decided to redirect some of the resources allocated to Karama to meet the vital needs of Malian refugees, Mauritanian returnees and host populations, who have agreed to make this water point available. But this is not enough and thanks to the funding provided by ECHO (the European Union’s humanitarian aid mechanism), we will be able to consolidate the network of access to drinking water and continue where we left off.”
The intervention of Action Against Hunger and the Karama project goes beyond access to water, as it strengthens the resilience of vulnerable populations, access to basic social services, governance and the technical capacities of local actors in the management of basic social services, natural resources, as well as in conflict management and prevention.
Not far from there, on the outskirts of the Mbera camp, lies the village of Mbera 2. Sheltered by a tentthe traditional Mauritanian shop, a few dozen women are preparing to go to the vegetable garden. In small groups, they take possession of plots of land where eggplants, watermelons, green beans, peanuts, okra and various herbs are slowly growing.
“There are 33 women’s cooperatives in Mbera 2 that benefit from this horticultural perimeter and are beginning to see the fruits of this activity. (…) We are not yet at the commercialization stage, but we already have enough to put in our pots,” explains Khadija Mint Oumar Sidi, mother and spokesperson for the cooperative that manages the garden. “More and more refugees want to come and work with us,” she adds.
Here, as in Aghor, however, the need remains the same: “We often have water problems. We need to have water at all times in order to be able to live.”
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