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Many 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 residence since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp leader mentally and physically fit, and permits him to check on the condition of other occupants.

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

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

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

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [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 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 addition, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government officials say the area is the third largest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop being concerned. 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] help almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt 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 characteristics of a established settlement, including its own financial institution, 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 enrolled in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, security patrols protect the camp from the risk of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have adopted new duties with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food 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 expectant mothers while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are evident.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” 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 given 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, essential food aid, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working continuously to obtain new funding through the diversification of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only items in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can make money and improve their livelihood.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable households, his heart longs 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 sufficient, 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 dignity.”