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Several 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 healthy in mind and body, and permits him to check on the wellbeing of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

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 mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the younger inhabitants of Mbera, which is positioned 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 country [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.”

Originally planned as a few thousand huts, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In furthermore, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

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

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes 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 neighbouring settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop 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 long-term settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols guard the camp from the threat of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new duties with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and operate 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 raising awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose 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 sit by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is mostly unseasoned, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working tirelessly to secure new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate business programmes to help refugees farm and keep animals so they can earn an income and enhance their standard of living.

Though Malha oversees everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to 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 rely solely on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“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 pride.”