Mauritania may be changing for the better

“FIRST I WILL buy food,” says Fatou, smiling as she receives 2,000 ouguiya ($55) in crisp notes. She needs the help. Her lodgings, a few small rooms in a seedy quarter of Nouakchott, Mauritania’s capital, are home to her elderly mother, her sister and five children. The cash is part of a government effort, backed by foreign donors, to help the poorest in the country through the pandemic. The government has other anti-poverty schemes that will outlast the pandemic, too. By the end of the year it plans to reach Mauritania’s 100,000 poorest households with payments of 1,500 ouguiya ($37) per quarter. It promises to more than double that amount soon.Such aid is unusual in this country of about 4.7m people, where inequality often runs along old divisions between former slave-owners, most of whom are lighter skinned, and the usually darker former slaves. Slavery was officially abolished only in 1981 and criminalised only in 2007.