11. 12. Nouakchott, Mauretania

Phone call to the French NGO „Zazou“, which Joachim found in the web. It is Friday, so (almost) everything is closed. We got hold of somebody who called around to find somebody to talk to us anyway, and we got an appointment for 5 p.m. – a representative would come to our place.

I went with Igor to the city center – well, we said „to the post office“, and on arrival the taxi driver told us „but it is closed on Fridays“. So we asked for the market, and he brought us to a huge area with lots of things, but almost no people, an a proper amount of trash on the fringes. The goat are doing the first separation of waste by eating the organic parts. We appreciated this and took some nice dividends for some of our lucky shareholders to do our part.

First part of the market we found mostly old clothes from Europe – socks, shirts, German military jackets. Further on, we discovered beautiful local clothes, and Igor bought shiny blue pants.

Precisely at 5, a quite young French man came and talked brilliant English and even some German. Martial Pouret introduced „Zazou“, an initiative to clean the environment from plastic waste, recycle and sell it, and at the same time empower women by giving them jobs. „Zazou“ is part of the French NGO „GRET“, that operates in 30 different countries.

Dealing with waste is quite problematic in Moslem societies, because waste is said to be associated with „djins“, (bad) spirits, and working with waste means getting in contact with this spirits. The next problem was, that men prefer to have their women at home and not out on the streets. Nevertheless they succeeded recruiting women workers, because no men can resist their earning of some „butter on the bread“. Zazou now works with 106 women´s cooperatives in Nouakchott, altogether more than 1000 women are involved in the project. Women are encouraged to clean up their own neighbourhood and not go to (plastic-rich) districts of the rich. Nevertheless, they often take taxies and go there, but as the price of the taxe goes for volume, almost no money is left for them.

We asked for the official communal waste deposit: this was run by a French company, and there was no possibility to access. Zazou is negociating with them to let the women work there and separate the valuable materials. Of course they would provide them with gloves, masks and information.

Asked for other initiatives, Martial gave us the contact to a local NGO, „ONG Arbre“, and he made some phone calls to get an appointment for the next day.