Nomadic roots, urban lives: the young Mongolians leading a transition [Video]

Freezing from horseback riding in the winter and helping her herder parents tend to livestock during summers spent outdoors — Bat-Erdene Khulan vividly remembers her childhood on Mongolia’s steppe.

She has since studied a master’s degree in Luxembourg, found work as a financial consultant, and made Mongolia’s capital city Ulaanbaatar her family home after moving away from her nomadic roots.

For millennia, Mongolians have lived off the land with their livestock in round ger dwellings that they pack up and move with the seasons.

A quarter of Mongolia’s 3.4 million people still lead nomadic lives, according to the World Bank, but hundreds of thousands have moved over the past two decades into Ulaanbaatar, now home to half the population.

And it is women like Khulan, who won a government scholarship for her master’s and is now 36, who have led the transition.

Speaking to AFP in the Ulaanbaatar apartment where …