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Several mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and enables him to check on the welfare of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg rebels fought with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

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

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young residents of Mbera, which is situated 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 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.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In addition, it is approximated 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-biggest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have severely slashed 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 trappings of a established settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, 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 biometric systems.

Nearby, police patrols protect the camp from the threat of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on 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 support those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse what little we have, but it is not enough for the requirements 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 largely basic, save for a few beans.

“We’re still offering school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most at-risk while working tirelessly to secure new funding through the broadening of our donor base.”

The meals are powered by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can make money and improve their livelihood.

Though Malha manages everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ support the most vulnerable households, his heart aches to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you sacrifice 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 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.”