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Several days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast 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 enables him to monitor the welfare of other residents.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg insurgents battled with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

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

The former math and science teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the young inhabitants 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 nation [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 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 live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third-biggest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts 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 nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop crucial nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a long-term settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children registered in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

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

Some residents have taken on new responsibilities with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and operate an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s requirements are clear.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough financial support or supplies,” 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 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 largely basic, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still offering school meals, basic food distributions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most at-risk while working tirelessly to secure new funding through the broadening of our support network.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only products in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can generate funds and improve their standard of living.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable households, his heart yearns to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you forfeit everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you rely solely on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is adequate, 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.”