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A number of 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 dwelling since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and permits him to check on the condition of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg rebels fought with the army in his native Timbuktu region.

After four years as a refugee, he returned home and worked for a year as a community worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again compelled him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the young residents 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 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.”

First established as a few thousand huts, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In furthermore, it is estimated 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, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country uncontrollable. 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 feeling anxious. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt vital nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a established settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, security patrols guard the camp from the danger of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new responsibilities with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those injured by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also raising awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s needs are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or supplies,” 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 served 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 almost plain, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still providing school meals, basic food distributions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most at-risk while working continuously to obtain new funding through the diversification of our support network.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts 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 start entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees cultivate and rear animals so they can make money and boost their standard of living.

Though Malha oversees everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy 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 sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“We are grateful to 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.”