🔗 Share this article

Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and permits him to monitor the welfare of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg rebels clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu region.

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

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

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [and] that is difficult because a refugee always has dual loyalties: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he longs to revisit one day.”

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

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

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a militant uprising that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt crucial nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children registered in school. New comers are registered by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols guard 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 cultivate food for sale and operate 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 desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs 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 cluster 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, basic food distributions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to acquire new funding through the expansion of our donor base.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can generate funds and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most vulnerable households, his heart yearns to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you forfeit everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you rely solely on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is adequate, 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 pride.”