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A number of days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and enables him to check on the wellbeing of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg rebels battled 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 transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again forced 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 country [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.”

Originally planned as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In also, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives 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 hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt crucial nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to financial constraints,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

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

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

Some residents have adopted new responsibilities with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those wounded by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough funding 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 mostly unseasoned, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working continuously to acquire new funding through the diversification of our donor base.”

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

Though Malha supervises everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable 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 sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“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.”