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Several days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and allows him to monitor the condition of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg rebels clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the younger 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 homeland [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.”

Originally planned as a few thousand huts, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In also, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees live 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 community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – notably 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 declining 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 discontinue vital 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 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 megaphones to get more children registered in school. New comers are documented by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, security patrols guard the camp from the threat of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new roles with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are evident.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough resources or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse 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 pulses.

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to secure new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are powered by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch business programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can generate funds and enhance their livelihood.

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

“When you leave your country, you forfeit 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 endure hardship.

“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.”