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Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and allows him to monitor the welfare of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg rebels clashed 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 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 particularly sorry for the younger residents of Mbera, which is situated approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on 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 dreams of returning to one day.”

Originally planned 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 reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third-biggest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a extremist rebellion that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes 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 worrying. 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] support almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt 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 features of a permanent settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children enrolled in school. New comers are registered by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, police patrols guard the camp from the danger of armed groups just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new duties with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are evident.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough financial support or supplies,” 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 sit by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most needy while working continuously to acquire new funding through the diversification of our funding sources.”

The meals are supported by recent gifts 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 entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can generate funds and boost their standard of living.

Though Malha supervises everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support the most disadvantaged 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 are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“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 self-respect.”