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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp elder mentally and physically fit, and permits him to monitor the wellbeing of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg insurgents battled with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

After four years as a refugee, he went back and worked for a year as a social worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg unrest once again pushed him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the young inhabitants of Mbera, which is situated approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [and] that is difficult because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he longs to revisit one day.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In furthermore, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government officials 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, running from a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country lawless. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued 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 crucial nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a long-term settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, security patrols secure the camp from the risk of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and manage an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those injured by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s needs are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough financial support or supplies,” 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 mostly unseasoned, save for a few beans.

“We’re still providing school meals, basic food distributions, 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 secure new funding through the diversification of our support network.”

The meals are supported by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees cultivate and raise animals so they can make money and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha oversees everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most disadvantaged households, his heart longs 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 enough, 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.”