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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 coordinator healthy in mind and body, and permits him to assess the wellbeing of other occupants.

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

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the young residents 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 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 shelters, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. 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 officials say the area is the third largest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have sharply reduced 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 halt essential nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the trappings 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 loudspeakers to get more children signed up in school. New arrivals are registered by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols secure the camp from the danger of militants 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 manage an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those injured by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 pulses.

“We’re still offering school meals, basic food distributions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working tirelessly to acquire new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only products in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can earn an income and improve their standard of living.

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