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A number of times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys 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 leader mentally and physically fit, and enables him to assess the condition of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg rebels clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

After four years as a refugee, he went back and worked for a year as a social worker before transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg unrest once again pushed him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the younger people of Mbera, which is located 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 nation [and] that is painful because a refugee always has two hearts: 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 houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government officials say the area is the third largest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, running from a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

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

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

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

Some residents have adopted new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and manage an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s needs are evident.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose 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 cluster 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, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most vulnerable while working continuously to secure new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

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

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most disadvantaged 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 rely solely on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is adequate, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“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.”