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Several mornings 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 activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator 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 left Mali as Tuareg insurgents battled with the army in his native Timbuktu region.

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 conflict once again pushed him across the border.

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

“Some of the kids 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 dual loyalties: 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 accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In furthermore, it is estimated 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 number three human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop vital nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to financial constraints,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a permanent settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children registered in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

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

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

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs 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 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 supplying school meals, staple provisions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most needy while working continuously to obtain new funding through the diversification of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only products in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can generate funds and enhance their standard of living.

Though Malha manages everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most vulnerable 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 endure hardship.

“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.”