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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 south-eastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and allows him to monitor the wellbeing of other occupants.

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

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

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

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [and] that is difficult because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he longs to revisit one day.”

First established as a few thousand huts, Mbera now hosts 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 province. More than half are under 18.

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

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a extremist rebellion that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have drastically cut 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 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 bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children registered in school. New arrivals are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols secure the camp from the risk of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new duties with enthusiasm: 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 care for those wounded by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s needs are evident.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough resources 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 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 largely basic, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working continuously to secure new funding through the diversification of our donor base.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate business programmes to help refugees grow crops and raise animals so they can earn an income and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support 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 are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“We are grateful to 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.”