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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and enables him to check on the wellbeing of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

After four years as a refugee, he returned home 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 especially sad for the young inhabitants of Mbera, which is positioned approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [and] that is difficult because a refugee always has two hearts: 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 accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In furthermore, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the third largest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut 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 discontinue crucial nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the trappings of a long-term settlement, including its own bank, 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 signed up in school. New comers are documented by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

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

Some residents have taken on new duties with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s needs are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough financial support or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse 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 providing school meals, basic food distributions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most at-risk while working relentlessly to obtain new funding through the expansion of our donor base.”

The meals are powered by recent contributions 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 self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and keep animals so they can generate funds and boost their livelihood.

Though Malha supervises everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy households, his heart yearns to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you forfeit everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“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.”