With a 46% poverty rate and slack security situation, Mauritania is an at-risk nation whose significance to global investors and statesmen is at an all-time high. The sparsely populated Islamic Republic of Mauritania straddles Arabo-Berber and black Africa and is bounded by a 700 km Atlantic coastline and the southern stretch of the Sahara. Once composed entirely of nomadic tribes, prolonged drought and famine in the 1970s and 80s forced a hasty mass sedentarization. Half of all Mauritanians still depend on agriculture and livestock for their livelihood, and the nation’s economic outlook is dismal enough by international standards to qualify for the last-resort Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). The political and security situations in the country have been highly unstable since independence in 1960, with regular coups d’etats unseating power often enough to cripple any earnest initiatives for economic development. In the latest of these coups, on August 6
