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Several times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and permits him to assess the welfare of other occupants.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

After four years as a refugee, he came back and worked for a year as a social worker before transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg fighting once again forced him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels especially sad for the young residents of Mbera, which is positioned 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 homeland [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 hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In furthermore, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government officials 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 pour in across the border, running from a militant uprising that co-opted 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 adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue essential nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a established settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children enrolled in school. New arrivals are registered by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, police patrols secure the camp from the risk of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new responsibilities with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources 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 pulses.

“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most vulnerable while working continuously to secure new funding through the broadening 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 bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can make money and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support 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 are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“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.”