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

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

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the younger people of Mbera, which is located approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [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 dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In furthermore, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives 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 arrive across the border, fleeing a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. 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 provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt vital nutrition programmes for hungry 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 bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children registered in school. New arrivals are documented by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

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

Some residents have adopted new roles with gusto: 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 injured by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s needs are obvious.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough resources or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the requirements 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 cluster 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 focusing on the most vulnerable while working continuously to secure new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered 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 start self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and raise animals so they can make money and improve their livelihood.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, 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 rely solely on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“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 dignity.”