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Several days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp leader vigorous, and allows him to check on the condition of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg rebels fought with the army in his home Timbuktu region.

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 fighting 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 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 nation [and] that is painful because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In furthermore, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the number three human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, running from a militant uprising that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced shrinking 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 food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt crucial 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 financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children signed up in school. New arrivals are documented by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, police patrols protect the camp from the danger of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new roles with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and operate an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those maimed by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also raising awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources 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 given 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 offering school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most needy while working continuously to obtain new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice provided 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 farm and raise animals so they can make money and enhance their livelihood.

Though Malha manages everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most disadvantaged households, his heart yearns to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you sacrifice everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is adequate, 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 pride.”