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Mauritania: New Govt Tackling Waste Management
Real estate news By Nouakchott
22 October 2007
Since the 1970s, Mauritania's capital city has been growing explosively and today a million people call the scruffy, ramshackle city's collection of tin-roofed shacks and rough concrete buildings home. Nouakchott's sanitation system has not kept up with the demand, and the Mauritanian capital often looks more like an open garbage dump than the country's showcase city.
The unsanitary conditions pose serious health risks and respiratory diseases are common there. But a new government, elected in March 2007, has pledged to put an end to that under the pledge: "A Clean City For Everyone". "We want to make sanitation a priority so that people can live in the best conditions of hygiene and healthiness," said Yaye N'Daw Coulibaly, Mayor of Tevragh Zeina, one of nine city districts that make up Nouakchott.
However, the anarchic city layout, coupled with the government's decades-long neglect of the city's infrastructure, has made collecting rubbish hard. "For several years, donors have been pressing the authorities to come up with a durable strategy for the collection and reprocessing of solid waste," explained Alain Gayrard, an advisor to the President of the Urban Community of Nouakchott (CUN).
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