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A number of times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp elder mentally and physically fit, and allows him to monitor the welfare of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg insurgents clashed 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 becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg fighting once again pushed him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the younger people of Mbera, which is situated 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 country [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.”

First established 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 authorities say the area is the third-biggest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, escaping a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have severely slashed 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 discontinue crucial nutrition programmes for hungry 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 bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children enrolled in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

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 gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and operate an firefighting unit 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 requirements are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” 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 given one meal daily by WFP. At one school with 100 children per class, six or seven of them sit by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few pulses.

“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 needy while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

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

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy households, his heart yearns 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 adequate, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“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 pride.”