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A number of 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 home since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp elder healthy in mind and body, and allows him to assess the welfare of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg rebels fought with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the younger residents 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 painful 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.”

First established as a few thousand huts, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In furthermore, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, running from a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased 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 discontinue essential nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to financial constraints,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

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

Nearby, police patrols protect the camp from the risk of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have adopted new roles with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and manage an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the requirements 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 almost plain, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most at-risk while working continuously to secure new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered 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 initiate business programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can make money and boost their quality of life.

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ assist the most disadvantaged households, his heart aches 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 adequate, 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 pride.”