Kiffa () is a large town in the far south region of Mauritania, and the name of an administrative area within the local Assaba Region. Kiffa is located at , some from the coast and at the western end of the Aoukar sand sea of southern Mauritania. Climate Kiffa has a hot desert climate (Köppen climate classification BWh). The climate is Sahelian, with April to June as the hottest months and eighty-five percent of the low annual rainfall occurring from July to September. In the 1990s and early 2000s Kiffa benefited from higher rainfall levels than elsewhere in the western Sahel. While Kiffa benefits from the ongoing "greening of the Sahel" the area's rangeland forage ecosystems remain vulnerable and can be subject to damaging overgrazing. Population, infrastructure and agriculture Kiffa was allowed to grow haphazardly and to sprawl during the later 20th century, and it has continued to do so. Near Kiffa is Kiffa Airport which has a tarmac runway of over 1,600 yards in length. But all practical travel to other parts of Mauritania is undertaken by taxi cars and trucks. About two thirds of the population are settled Berber pastoralists, who as late as the 1950s operated as sheep, goat and camel herding nomads. Political and social life is largely dictated by hereditary family allegiances, now expressed amid a complex wider tangle of religious, regionalist and nationalist affiliations. From 1948 the French colonists ran experimental palm-date plantations in the red soil around Kiffa, having had great success with date-growing elsewhere in Mauritania, but labor and water shortages caused these to fail by 1952. A small-scale reforestation program, intended to guard against sand dune encroachment, was tried to little effect in the late 1980s. China has had a healthcare aid relationship with Mauritania since 1968, and at 2013 Chinese volunteer doctors continued to offer their services at Kiffa hospital. The nation of Japan is also involved in health-related aid to Kiffa, having funded a major Study on Groundwater Development for Kiffa. In 2002 Japan followed up the report by undertaking the first of an ongoing series of US$5 million worth of projects that now supply basic drinking water and basic water sanitation. The town's Berber nomadic heritage meant that Kiffa has continued to support an extensive livestock trade based on bush forage grazing, mixed with limited millet-based agrarian activity. A large produce market at Kiffa continues to attract traders