Life for 120,000 Asylum Seekers in Mauritania's Massive Refugee Camp on the Mali Frontier.

Many times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and permits him to monitor the condition of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg rebels battled with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

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 unrest once again pushed him across the border.

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

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [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 longs to revisit one day.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In addition, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the third-biggest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut 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 halt crucial nutrition programmes for malnourished 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 shops, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children registered in school. New arrivals are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

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

Some residents have adopted new duties with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those wounded by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are clear.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough funding or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs of the camp.”

In the schools, the children are provided one meal daily by WFP. At one school with 100 children per class, six or seven of them sit 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 supplying school meals, basic food distributions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working continuously to acquire new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are supported by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only goods in a bulk 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 boost their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist 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 enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“We appreciate 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 dignity.”