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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and enables him to assess the wellbeing of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

After four years as a refugee, he came back and worked for a year as a social 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 younger inhabitants of Mbera, which is situated approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on 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 huts, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 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 settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent 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 provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue vital nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to financial constraints,” 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 shops, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children registered in school. New comers are documented by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

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

Some residents have assumed new duties with enthusiasm: 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 look after those maimed by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s needs are evident.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs of the camp.”

In the schools, the children are given 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 beans.

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the diversification of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only goods in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can make money and improve their quality of life.

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

“When you leave your country, you lose 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 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 self-respect.”