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A number of mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp leader vigorous, and enables him to assess the welfare of other occupants.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists clashed with the army in his native Timbuktu region.

After four years as a refugee, he went back and worked for a year as a social worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg fighting once again forced 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 children who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has split affections: 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 accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In also, 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 largest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct 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 discontinue crucial nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the trappings of a established settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children enrolled in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, police patrols secure the camp from the threat of fighters 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 manage an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also raising awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s demands 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 demands of the camp.”

In the schools, the children are provided 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 mostly unseasoned, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most at-risk while working relentlessly to obtain new funding through the broadening of our support network.”

The meals are powered by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only goods in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and rear animals so they can generate funds and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha oversees everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to 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 enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“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.”