Blitz Bureau
NOUADHIBOU: 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, according to an AP report filed by Sam Metz.
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, said the AP report further. As authorities strengthen security measures on long-established routes, migrants are resorting to longer, more perilous ones. From Mauritania, they risk hundreds of miles 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 Outdated infrastructure and unpaved roads have not kept pace as European and Chinese investment pours into the fishing industry, and as migrants and their children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 programme envisioned as part of the 210 million euro ($219 million) accord the European Union and Mauritania brokered last year.
The deal – one of several that Europe has signed with neighbouring states to deter migration – funds border patrol, development aid and programmes 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, it said.
