Mauritania is a northeastern African country that neighbors Western Sahara, Algeria, Mali, and Senegal. With 90% of its territory in the Sahara Desert, the majority of the Mauritanians reside in or around the capital Nouakchott, on the coast.

The country hosts over 15,498 urban refugees and asylum-seekers and almost 84,367 Malian refugees in and around Mbera Refugee Camp.

Despite a peace agreement in Mali in 2015, large-scale Malian refugee returns are not expected due to persistent violence in northern and central Mali.

RET began operations in Mauritania in 2019 and has made enormous strides in that time to protect communities from recruitment into armed groups. Nearly 70% of our program participants in the country are vulnerable women and girls, and we are the only service provider in the Mbera Camp with two active protection centers dedicated to providing individual and group psychosocial support.

We have created innovative programs for people with disabilities, especially children and their families, and we have also constructed a recreational and gaming space next to the youth center in Mbera Camp. And we were among the first NGOs to implement distance learning measures there during COVID-19.

Today, we’re continuing to provide catch-up courses through our Functional Literacy and Numeracy Program.

In Mauritania, there is a general lack of interest in schooling and a higher emphasis placed on entering the workforce, with the decision to end schooling being mainly taken by the family.

That’s why in the Hodh Chargui region, we’ve worked to re-integrate out-of-school children into the educational system and prevent school dropout by setting up a 9-month accelerate learning program in our alternative education centers.

Quality education is the basis for developing sustainable, independent communities and stable societies. To this end, we supported schools by working with them to make their program management more effective and efficient and ultimately create a more inviting environment while also providing quality education.

We’ve worked to build educational resilience in the Mbera Camp by providing secondary education, functional literacy, numeracy classes, and psychosocial support to out-of-school adolescents and youth. We’ve reached over 11,000 youth directly, indirectly benefitting over 40,000. But the need continues as there are still many in the camp that could benefit from our interventions.

Through this project, we’ve enhance educational resilience, improved access to accredited education, and promoted psychosocial well-being, as well as addressed community violence issues and emphasized the importance of taking advantage of educational opportunities to eliminate dependency and promote resilience.