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Several mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp elder mentally and physically fit, and allows him to check on the wellbeing of other residents.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

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 unrest once again pushed him across the border.

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

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [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.”

First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In furthermore, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

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

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased 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 halt 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 permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

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

Some residents have taken on new roles with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and operate an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those wounded by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the determination, 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 requirements 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 cluster by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still supplying school meals, staple provisions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most needy while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the expansion of our donor base.”

The meals are powered by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start business programmes to help refugees cultivate and rear animals so they can earn an income and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most disadvantaged 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 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.”