GIMBIT VAR SDER (Mauritania): It was Abdallah who decided to fight the dunes and push back the desert in Mauritania, an arid country in north-west Africa, with tenacity and common sense as his only weapons.

A small man with a tanned skin, burnt by a scorching sun, Abdallah Ould Ahmed Sidi, 58, speaks with passion and energy as he moves around the sands encircling his home at the village of Gimbit Var Sder in far-eastern Mauritania.

“The people did not understand what I wanted to do, so I started by myself with my children. We worked for 12 years with our hands to gather thorny bushes for fencing and to pick wild fruits,” he said.

Abdallah’s project began after one of the great droughts that ravaged Mauritania in the 1970s, which fuelled an unprecedented rural exodus and widespread desertification.

“We lost everything,” Abdallah said.

“I heard that there were people fighting for land or for a hillock. I told myself that if I got a chance to own some land, I would fight against both the sand and the wind to safeguard it. It’s for this that I never thought of leaving.”

His first task was to fence a vast area of wild berry trees so that they would not be eaten by livestock.

Despite the difficulties of climate and his lack of specialized training to fight the progress of the desert, Abdallah was undeterred.

Luck smiled on him and he was able to grow a good harvest of jujubes, which he sold for a good price in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott.

That enabled him to buy 50 goats, three camels and left him enough money to finance a third of a project he had in mind — to enclose some 300 hectares (740 acres) of cultivable land to start an afforestation programme.

An elder in his community, Abdallah Ould Ahmed Sidi was able to realize his dream with the backing of some non-governmental organizations.

The results have been spectacular. Today about 200 families have directly profited from his initiative and the advancing desert has been stopped in its tracks. He also began training to stop desertification and planted some wild nutritive plants.

He developed products which he could sell at a higher value allowing him to build on his capital.

The measures paid off but the fight against the desert was not over. Abdallah next built a barrier to stop the sands. The only thing he lacked was money.—AFP