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1144AAFriCAlinkswww.slowfoodfoundation.orgels. From 1960 to 2010, the population of Africa rose from 280 million to more than a billion. According to UN forecasts, in 2050 it will have more than doubled (2.4 billion) and by the end of the century it will have grown fourfold (4.2 billion).As the elite few nouveaux riches get wealthier and wealthier, so the number of people suffering from hunger is ris- ing too, from 175 million to 240 million in the last 25 years. All of which makes the continent a breeding ground for re- cruits to the extremist groups—Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Shabab in Soma- lia, Isis in Egypt and Libya, Al Qaeda in Niger and Mali—that are proliferating across the continent.a Laboratory of idEasfor thE futurEBut Africa is also a laboratory of ideas for a different future. There are commu- nities that are starting from scratch in their local areas, and young people full of energy and creativity who are com- bining traditional skills with new tech- nologies to protect the environment and raise the profile of local products, turning them into tools of social and economic redemption. Young people are studying, graduating, attending master programs (often overseas), then returning to their villages to accompany their communities.This is the reality that we are trying to tune into with our projects at Slow Food: from 10,000 Gardens in Africa to our 30 Presidia in Africa to the net- works of chefs promoting producers (the Slow Food Cooks Alliance in Mo- rocco). In Africa our activities are mul- tiplying month by month and, as new gardens and Presidia spring up, and as the number of food products on the Ark of Taste increases (from 100 to over 200 in one year), we are also putting a lot of effort into improving, reinforcing and developing existing projects.One example is the work we have done in Mauritania, a vast country consisting mainly of desert, but with a 700-kilom-eter coastline looking onto one of the world’s best seas for fishing. In 2006, the government sold the European Union its fishing rights in exchange for a reduction of its public debt. It was a senseless de- cision and it compromised 50% of mul- let stocks. It was in this dismal context that a Slow Food Presidium attempted to save what was left of small-scale coastal fishing by backing a product processed by women: mullet botargo, or roe.The project got off the ground pre- cisely in 2006 in conjunction with Mau- ritanie2000, an NGO with more than 200 female members. Since then a situation that was precarious in terms of hygiene alone has been transformed into a professional supply chain, with up-to-standard workshops producing and packaging high-quality roe for the local and international market. All this extraordinary progress has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of the producers and technicians of the Slow Food Orbetello Botargo Pre- sidium in Italy, who travelled to see the situation firsthand in Mauritania, host- ed some of the women involved in their native Tuscany, and worked with them elbow-to-elbow for a few weeks.But one ingredient was missing to make the chain complete: salt. Previously it had to be bought in from Spain because the local product, gathered in dire hy- gienic conditions, was unusable. Then other top-notch producers, the salt workers of Guérande in France, got in- volved and became partners of the Pre- sidium through their Univers-Sel founda- tion. In 2014 the European Union began funding a project (Sa.Sal.No, Saliculture solaire à Nouadhibou) to produce su- perior sea salt in situ. Storage tanks were built in the Baie de l’Etoile, north of the port of Nouadhibou and soon to become a protected marine area, and 50 producers, mostly women, attended training courses (in Mauritania, but also in Guerande, in France).A production manual set down the rules for achieving a top-quality, clean,AllMMAAnnAACCCo© ArChivio Slow Food