🔗 Share this article

Several days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and allows him to monitor the wellbeing of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg insurgents clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

After four years as a refugee, he returned home and worked for a year as a community worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again pushed him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the young residents of Mbera, which is situated approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [and] that is painful because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the third largest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue essential nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a long-term settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are documented by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols secure the camp from the threat of armed groups just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new roles with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and manage an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those injured by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s needs are evident.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands of the camp.”

In the schools, the children are served one meal daily by WFP. At one school with 100 children per class, six or seven of them cluster by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is almost plain, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still supplying school meals, essential food aid, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to secure new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees farm and rear animals so they can make money and enhance their livelihood.

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most needy households, his heart longs to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you sacrifice everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you depend only on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“We are grateful to the Mauritanian authorities and the humanitarian organisations for what they have done for us but it is not the same as being in your own country, working with your own hands and living with self-respect.”