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Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and enables him to assess the wellbeing of other occupants.

His initial stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg insurgents fought 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 unrest once again compelled him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young inhabitants of Mbera, which is situated approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the kids 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 two hearts: 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 huts, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In addition, it is approximated 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 settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. 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] support almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop 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 features of a established 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 registered in school. New arrivals are documented by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols protect the camp from the threat of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have adopted new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and run an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those maimed by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose 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 gather by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is mostly unseasoned, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still offering school meals, staple provisions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most at-risk while working continuously to acquire new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are supported by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only goods in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and rear animals so they can generate funds and improve their livelihood.

Though Malha oversees everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most needy households, his heart aches to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you lose 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 suffer.

“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.”