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Several times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and allows him to check on the condition of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg rebels battled 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 fighting once again compelled him across the border.

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

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is painful 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.”

Originally planned as a few thousand huts, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In addition, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. 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 come across the border, escaping a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop crucial nutrition programmes for hungry 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 bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children registered in school. New arrivals are registered by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

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

Some residents have assumed new roles with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s needs are evident.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough financial support or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the requirements 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 almost plain, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still offering school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to secure new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded 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 launch self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees farm and rear animals so they can generate funds and improve their livelihood.

Though Malha oversees everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable 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 endure hardship.

“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 dignity.”