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Several times 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 residence since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and permits him to monitor the wellbeing of other occupants.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg insurgents clashed with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

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 fighting once again pushed him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the younger people of Mbera, which is positioned 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 nation [and] that is heartbreaking 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.”

Originally planned as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In also, 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 representatives say the area is the number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop vital nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to financial constraints,” 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 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children enrolled in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

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

Some residents have taken on new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and manage an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or equipment,” 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 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 legumes.

“We’re still supplying school meals, basic food distributions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most at-risk while working continuously to obtain new funding through the diversification of our donor base.”

The meals are powered by recent donations 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 business programmes to help refugees grow crops and keep animals so they can make money and improve their standard of living.

Though Malha manages everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most needy households, his heart aches 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 suffer.

“We are grateful to 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.”