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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 south-eastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp leader vigorous, and allows him to monitor the wellbeing of other residents.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg insurgents 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 compelled him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young people of Mbera, which is positioned approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has dual loyalties: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he longs to revisit one day.”

First established as a few thousand huts, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition, 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 authorities say the area is the number three human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a militant uprising that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both food or cash 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 features of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football programmes. 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 biometric systems.

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

Some residents have assumed new roles with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s needs are obvious.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough financial support or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 largely basic, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still supplying 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 vulnerable while working continuously to obtain new funding through the broadening of our support network.”

The meals are funded by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and raise animals so they can generate funds and improve their standard of living.

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

“We appreciate 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.”