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A number of mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator mentally and physically fit, and enables him to assess the wellbeing of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg rebels battled 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 unrest once again pushed him across the border.

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

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [and] that is difficult 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.”

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

Government representatives say the area is the third largest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue crucial nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a established 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 loudspeakers to get more children enrolled in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

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

Some residents have taken on new roles with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those injured by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough financial support or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse 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 gather 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, staple provisions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most at-risk while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the diversification of our support network.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start business programmes to help refugees farm and rear animals so they can generate funds and boost their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ assist the most needy 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 are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is adequate, 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.”