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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and permits him to check on the welfare of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg insurgents clashed with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

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

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young 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 once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has dual loyalties: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he hopes to go back to one day.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand dwellings, 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 reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the third largest human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, running from a militant uprising that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop essential nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to financial constraints,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the trappings of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children enrolled in school. New entrants are documented by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

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

Some residents have taken on new duties with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those maimed by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also raising awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s needs are obvious.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough financial support or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 gather 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 financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most at-risk while working tirelessly to acquire new funding through the broadening of our donor base.”

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

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most disadvantaged 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 adequate, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“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 self-respect.”