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A number of mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and allows him to monitor the wellbeing of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg rebels battled with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

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

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

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have not once visited 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 dreams of returning to one day.”

Originally planned as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is approximated 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 settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced dwindling 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 halt 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 characteristics of a permanent 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 amplifiers to get more children enrolled in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

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

Some residents have taken on 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 wounded by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s needs are clear.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 largely basic, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most needy while working tirelessly to acquire new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are supported by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only goods in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and keep animals so they can earn an income and improve their standard of living.

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable households, his heart aches 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 self-respect.”