Due to environmental degradation , women must spend more time collecting wood and water, and producing food crops to supplement production from family fields. For example, the average round trip to collect wood in Hodh el Chargui, in Mauritania, is 15km once every 10 days by cart or 3 times a week by headload. Sedentarization changes gender roles and tasks in pastoral societies. Traditionally, men are responsible for herding and for major decisions related to herding practices, whereas women were responsible for collecting fodder, caring for small ruminants and sick animals, and for processing and marketing milk and milk products, hides, skins and wool. Moreover, increased isolation from the herd and the move from milk products controlled by women to meat products controlled by men diminishes women's authority.
Male migration can be substantial.
Remittances have hastened integration of the semi-subsistence and cash economies, but women are in many ways worse off. The women left in the village are unable to use their husbands' draft animals which are normally left under the control of another man, and do not have land rights. They, therefore, spend dramatically more time farming family and compound land to the detriment of their own agricultural and other activities. They do not control the outputs from this communal land, and most decisions are made by the male head of the extended family under whose authority they remain. Intensification of farming .