🔗 Share this article

Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and enables him to check on the wellbeing of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg insurgents battled with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

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

The former math and science teacher says he feels especially sad for the younger inhabitants of Mbera, which is positioned 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 homeland [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has two hearts: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he hopes to go back to one day.”

Originally planned as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In furthermore, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, fleeing a militant uprising that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas 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 adjacent settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop essential nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to financial constraints,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a long-term settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children signed up in school. New comers are registered by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

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

Some residents have adopted new responsibilities with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those wounded by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s requirements are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the requirements of the camp.”

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

“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most vulnerable while working continuously to secure new funding through the broadening of our donor base.”

The meals are supported by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only products in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start business programmes to help refugees farm and keep animals so they can generate funds and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy households, his heart yearns to return to Mali.

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

“We thank 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.”