Mamayacim integration pathway
A young twenty-five (25) year old seamstress, Mamayacim is a fairly popular figure among former students of the Caritas training and professional integration center. She, in fact, had the opportunity to appear in a documentary on the training center broadcast on the “Sahara +” channel (and of which she proudly shows us the extract), as well as on other media interview her on the occasion of Women's Day in order to show the example of a successful woman in Mauritania to motivate young girls to become entrepreneurs.
She is also very present on social networks, on Tiktok in particular, a platform on which she presents her creations and receives her orders. It was after having failed twice to obtain the baccalaureate that she decided to accompany her neighbors to the Center in order to obtain information and ended up registering. She will stay there for two years, between 2019 and 2020, to learn sewing. During the pandemic, she did not get discouraged and bought a sewing machine and studied the techniques of other seamstresses at the market or on YouTube, and she learned them.
She explains that without it, she would not be where she is today. Likewise, faced with the arrival of the Coronavirus in Mauritania, she sewed masks, notably for the Training Center itself, before starting to market them on her own. It was her father who pushed her to open her own workshop before dying, leaving her an orphan. It should be noted that she previously lost her mother in 2010.
Mamayacim therefore clings to her production and her ambition, in memory of her father, although her brothers and sisters do not support her, not wanting her to work. This lively young woman full of ideas says she is living proof that it is possible to succeed outside of school, even without support. She persevered and now advises her friends who have dropped out of school to follow training offered by Caritas. She even says that she seemed so determined that a man at the market gave her a sewing machine that was more efficient than hers. However, Mamayacim faces certain difficulties, now that she is known.
She has many orders but some are impossible for her to fulfill because she does not have the means to advance the material. She therefore naturally wanted to expand her workshop and acquire new, more sophisticated embroidery machines.