"Common Ground": A study on how building social cohesion led to economic independence through shared land ownership for women in Mauritania
Concordis International has been working in Mauritania's Senegal River Valley since 2013 to encourage the local communities to resolve their differences and coexist peacefully for mutual economic benefit. This process aimed to overcome historical inter-community rifts that reached their peak during the 'events' of 1989. The conflict was characterised in particular by a deep-seated disagreement over the use of natural resources and land ownership.
Initiating a process of dialogue and mediation, Concordis worked in partnership with local NGO FONADH to support the conflicting parties in overcoming their differences and re-establish open and inclusive channels of communication, transcending ethnic, gender, and age divisions. Today, project participants testify that social cohesion is at its peak, along with the shared management of natural resources for mutual gain. Social cohesion is clearly visible in social ties, for instance, in the multiplicity of intercommunity marriages.
The strengthening of social cohesion has been accompanied by unprecedented social changes affecting women in particular. Intercommunity income-generating activities (IGAs) chosen by the participants have been set up thanks to and in support of this social cohesion. The particular case of market gardens - this emblematic "common ground" - is described in detail in this study.
Once a source of conflict, these areas of land have become, through dialogue, the subject of community agreements and have been given to multi-community women's cooperatives for their joint agricultural work. It provides women with financial independence that contributes to their growing autonomy, although it goes hand in hand with an additional workload: the work in the fields that is now added to domestic work, which is not subject to task-sharing.
Read our full study based on information collected throughout the successive projects in the three Mauritanian regions of Trarza, Brakna and Gorgol.
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UN Secretary-General, An agenda for peace : preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping : report of the Secretary-General pursuant to the statement adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security, 31 Jan 1992
John Paul Lederach, In Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1997), 20