‘We gained an intimate insight into nomadic herder’s lives; often interviewing herders while they disemboweled a freshly slaughtered sheep, or milked hundreds of yaks,’ says Anoushka Carter, describing her expedition to Mongolia in the summer of 2017. She came up with the idea for the research trip while still a geography student at the University of Exeter and carried it out with four friends over two months. Her goal was to investigate the migration of people from the Mongolian countryside to the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, often called the ‘ger district’ due to the prevalence of traditional circular tents.
The ger district has grown rapidly over the last 20 years, along with the capital’s centre. Barely more than a village in 1940, Ulaanbaatar is now home to 1.46 million people, around 45 per cent of the country’s total population. This busy city, known for its heaving traffic, stands apart from the rest of Mongolia which has one of the smallest population densities in the world.
A ger is a round tent traditionally covered with fur or felt and used by the nomadic communities of the steppes of central Asia
An estimated 60 per cent of Ulaanbaatar's residents live in the ger district. With its sprawling tents and lack of infrastructure it is the huge and ramshackle fringe to the centre’s glossy skyscrapers. Many of the people who live there lack access to basic public services such as water, sewage systems and central heating – yet people keep coming. ‘We were propelled into a nation facing rapid political, economic and environmental change,’ says Carter. ‘The aim was to understand the reasons why, within one of the world’s oldest nomadic populations, so many people are leaving their life in rural Mongolia to live in unplanned “ger areas” on the edge of Ulaanbaatar.’
The built-up centre and the ger areas on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar have both expanded rapidly
To understand this movement, Carter and her team spoke to 20 nomadic pastoralist households – people who still live in the countryside of northern and southern Mongolia – as well as more than 30 families who now reside in two of the largest ger areas. They kept to a strict sample criterion for their study; people who had migrated within the last ten years and who lived in two specific regions of the city. They also held focus groups with migrants residing in other provincial capitals and liaised with charity and aid organisations on the ground.
Through these conversations Carter and her team were able to pinpoint some of the reasons for migration to urban areas. Environmental factors stood out as the main driver. ‘Increases in environmental hazards are making pastoralism a more challenging lifestyle,’ explains Carter. Key among these hazards is the dzud, a weather-related phenomenon unique to Mongolia. Caused by the twin-perils of drought in summer and severe freezing and storms in winter, it’s a combination that devastates livestock; whole herds can be wiped out in one season. The summer drought means there is inadequate pasture and production of hay while the heavy snow that follows prevents livestock from accessing what pasture there is. During the 2016-17 dzud, more than 1.1 million livestock were lost and the dzud in 2010 killed 17 per cent of the country’s livestock. Migration to the city inevitably increases after one of these events.
The summer drought in rural Mongolia leads to inadequate pasture and production of hay for livestock
The people who Carter spoke to believed that conditions were getting worse. ‘NGOs and families repeatedly emphasised that they had never seen a drought like the one they had experienced during the summer of 2017. As the Mongolian way of life collides with environmental changes, many people were adamant that their stories should be shared with the rest of the world.’ She also found that moving to the city does not offer an instant panacea. ‘Many ex-herders come to the city with no employable skills which makes finding a job very hard,’ she says. ‘Many are therefore reliant on casual labour and their income is insufficient in meeting their family’s needs. No longer having livestock means families have to purchase all their food and people feel less safe in their community compared to the countryside.’
Mongolia's harsh winters can wipe out herds of livestock in one season
Though Carter's expedition was successful in highlighting the changes in Mongolia and identifying some of the key causes, it was also a learning curve for the team of students. They had difficulty finding translators to accompany them on each trip and the rural areas presented problems of their own. ‘Sometimes we were unable to camp near nomadic families which meant we were often away from wells or rivers and had to travel up to 30 miles to locate water,’ says Carter.
The biggest challenge of all related to their chosen research methodology. ‘With certain families, our translator in the countryside felt uncomfortable asking a particular question we had included in the questionnaire,’ says Carter. ‘The translator took issue with asking people to quantify what was a qualitative concept (how satisfied people were with their lives). We wholeheartedly respected his opinions and did not enforce it upon him to ask the question. However, it ultimately did impede the consistency of our data set.’
Lessons learnt, the goal is now to work on the material collected during the trip, particularly video footage. ‘We aim to collate this footage into a short educational documentary of a media worthy, and professional, standard,’ says Carter.
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