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Several times 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 activity keeps the 84-year-old camp elder mentally and physically fit, and permits him to check on the welfare of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg insurgents fought with the army in his home 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 pushed him across the border.

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

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on 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 longs to revisit one day.”

First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third-biggest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, fleeing a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money 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 features of a long-term settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children signed up in school. New comers are documented by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, security patrols secure the camp from the threat of fighters just a few miles from the border.

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

But the camp’s requirements are evident.

“We have the desire, 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 given 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 almost plain, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still supplying school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most needy while working continuously to obtain new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are powered by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only items in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees cultivate and raise animals so they can earn an income and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha manages everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable 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 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 self-respect.”