NOUADHIBOU, MAURITANIA — Eager students from throughout west Africa raise their hands as teachers guide them through math and classical Arabic. Then they race outdoors to meet their parents, who clean houses, drive informal taxis or gut sardines in Chinese factories.
Outside, government billboards urge these families and others to fight “migrant smuggling,” showing overcrowded boats navigating the Atlantic’s thrashing waves. Inside, posters warn the ocean can be deadly.
Such messaging is hard to escape in Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s second-largest city and a launch point on an increasingly popular migrant route toward Europe. As authorities strengthen security measures on long-established routes, migrants are resorting to longer, more perilous ones. From Mauritania, they risk hundreds of kilometers of sea and howling winds to reach Spain’s Canary Islands.
The route puts new strain on this port city of 177,000 people at the edge of the Sahara. Outdated infrastructure and unpaved roads have not kept pace as European and Chinese investment pours into the fishing industry, and as migrants and their children arrive from as far away as Syria and Pakistan.
The school for children of migrants and refugees, set up in 2018 as an early response to the growing need, is the kind of program envisioned as part of the $219 million accord the European Union and Mauritania brokered last year.
The deal — one of several that Europe has signed with neighboring states to deter migration — funds border patrol, development aid and programs supporting refugees, asylum-seekers and host communities.
It’s a response to rising alarm and anti-migration politics in Europe. Nearly 47,000 migrants arrived on boats in the Canaries last year, a record “fueled by departures from Mauritania, even as flows from other departure points declined,” according to the EU border agency Frontex. Almost 6,000 were unaccompanied children under 18.
Tracking deaths at sea is difficult, but the Spanish nonprofit Walking Borders says at least 6,800 people died or went missing while attempting the crossing last year. Conditions are so harsh that boats drifting off course can end up in Brazil or the Caribbean.
Though many praise initiatives that fulfill migrants and refugees’ overlooked needs, few believe they will be effective in discouraging departures for Europe — even the head of the group that runs the Nouadhibou school.
“We can’t stop migration,” said Amsatou Vepouyoum, president of the Organization for the Support of Migrants and Refugees, the city’s leading migrant aid group. “But through raising awareness, we want to improve the conditions under which people leave.”
Preparing for an uncertain future
The organization years ago surveyed the migrant population and found that education was one of the biggest barriers to integration in Mauritania.
Bill Van Esveld, a children’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that’s true around the world. Many countries that migrants and refugees pass through erect bureaucratic hurdles to school access, he said.
“Without literacy or numeracy, how can you advocate for yourself as someone who has human rights in today’s world?” Van Esveld said.
Mauritania’s Education Ministry in a January directive affirmed that refugee children have the right to attend public school. But that hasn’t applied for many migrants who don’t qualify as refugees and face difficulty enrolling because they lack birth certificates, residency papers or school records.
The school for Nouadhibou’s migrant and refugee children ages 5 to 12 runs parallel to Mauritania’s school system and teaches a similar curriculum as well as Arabic, aiming to integrate children into public classrooms by sixth grade.
Families often don’t plan to stay in Mauritania, but parents still describe the school as a lifeline for kids’ futures, wherever they will be.
“Sometimes life’s circumstances leave you somewhere, so you adapt, and what ends up happening leads you to stay,” Vepouyoum said.
Weak oversight and worried parents
From Europe’s perspective, funneling aid toward such initiatives is part of a larger effort to persuade people not to migrate. Some experts say it also demonstrates a disconnect between political goals and on-the-ground realities.
“The European Union always announces these big sums, but it’s very difficult to figure out how the money is actually spent,” said Ulf Laessing, the Sahel program director at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank.
Both the school and the Organization for the Support of Migrants and Refugees have had their work highlighted by the EU and member states, along with United Nations agencies. None have said how much money they have spent on the school or on other programs aimed at migrants in Mauritania.
The school said it also charges students based on what families can afford so it can pay rent on its two-story cinderblock building and utilities, Vepouyoum said.
But four parents, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they worried about their children getting kicked out, said the baseline monthly fee of $15 per child was too much.
“If you can’t pay, they’ll kick you out,” a father of two students from Mali said.
He said many parents want to give children opportunities they lacked in their home countries. He has heard from other parents that enrolling in school is easier in the Canary Islands, but limited access to education is also a problem there.
The school in Nouadhibou says it has educated over 500 students. It has not tracked the number who continue on toward Europe.
Pressures to move on
Times are changing in Nouadhibou. Community leaders and business owners worry that increasing competition for jobs has fueled suspicion toward foreign-born communities.
That includes workers from neighboring Senegal and Mali who settled in the city years ago. Aid groups say outreach is easier among long-term migrants because newcomers worry about drawing attention to themselves — sometimes because they’re looking for smugglers to help them move on, said Kader Konate, a community leader from Mali.
Many migrants say they just need help.
“We are doing this because we feel have no other choice,” Boureima Maiga said.
The 29-year-old graduate with a teaching degree fled Mali as extremist violence escalated. On many days, he waits at the Nouadhibou port alongside hundreds of other migrants, hoping for work in fish factory “cold rooms.”
But without residency or work visas, they are often turned away, or have pay withheld — an abuse they fear would bring retaliation if reported.
Maiga feels trapped in a country where deep racial divisions between Arab and Black Africans make integration nearly impossible, with discrimination by employers widespread. He is unsure where to go next.
“Just let me work. I can do a lot of jobs,” he said. “Everyone knows how to do something.”
Meanwhile, every day, he picks up his nieces at a Catholic school, hoping it will give them a life beyond such worries.
…