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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks 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 elder healthy in mind and body, and allows him to assess the condition of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg insurgents clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

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

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the younger residents of Mbera, which is positioned 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 painful because a refugee always has two hearts: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

Originally planned as a few thousand huts, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In also, it is approximated 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 number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

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

The camp has many of the characteristics of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children registered in school. New arrivals are processed by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, police patrols guard the camp from the threat of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new roles with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and manage an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those maimed by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

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

“We’re still supplying school meals, basic food distributions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most needy while working continuously to secure new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are funded by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only items in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can earn an income and boost their standard of living.

Though Malha oversees everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable households, his heart longs 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 sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“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.”