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Several days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and permits him to monitor the condition of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his native Timbuktu region.

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the young people 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 painful 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.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In addition, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government officials say the area is the third-biggest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, escaping a militant uprising that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop vital nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to financial constraints,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a permanent settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children registered in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols guard the camp from the threat of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new roles 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 look after those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s needs are clear.

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

In the schools, the children are given 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 beans.

“We’re still providing 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 vulnerable while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are funded by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only items in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate business programmes to help refugees cultivate and rear animals so they can generate funds and boost their standard of living.

Though Malha oversees everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ assist the most disadvantaged households, his heart aches 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 enough, 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 self-respect.”