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Several days 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 routine keeps the 84-year-old camp elder mentally and physically fit, and permits him to monitor the welfare of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists fought 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 pushed him across the border.

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

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [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.”

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

Government authorities say the area is the number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country lawless. Aid workers – notably 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 discontinued USAID – have drastically cut 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 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 characteristics of a permanent 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 megaphones to get more children registered in school. New entrants are documented by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols protect the camp from the danger of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have adopted new roles with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and manage an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s needs are obvious.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough financial support 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 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 largely basic, save for a few beans.

“We’re still supplying school meals, basic food distributions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most at-risk while working continuously to acquire new funding through the diversification of our donor base.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch business programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can make money and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ cater to 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 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.”