Mauritania’s internal migration dynamics and trends in response to rainfall variability and change1

Abstract

The northwest African country of Mauritania is a vast, desert territory, which was historically been dominated by pastoral nomads. Since independence in 1960, the country has witnessed a dramatic sedentarization of its nomadic population, as well as settlements in and movements to urban centers. This vast sedentarization movement coupled with internal and interregional migration has resulted in the growth of Mauritania’s urban population from less than 10 percent of the total population in 1965 to nearly 90 percent in 2013. Factors that have caused this rapid urbanization, include the droughts that spanned the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, and the turbulent transformation of Mauritania’s political economy. The aim of this study is to determine and examine internal migration flows to analyze the relationship between long-term rainfall changes and dynamic spatial demographic shifts in terms of movements toward urban centers. In this regard, we propose an assessment approach that integrates official statistics from the decennial census and rainfall data, with available socioeconomic variables, to characterize interregional migration flows. Our result confirms that rates of interregional migration remain elevated and are expected to increase. In 2013, 702,575 individuals were documented as having participated in interregional migration, comprising 17.5 percent of the total population. In comparison, there were 477,814 individuals, which migrated inter-regionally in 2000, and 208,039 in 1988. These results demonstrate distinct interactions between climate variability and interregional migration in Mauritania throughout the past four decades.