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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and permits him to monitor the wellbeing of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg rebels battled 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 becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg unrest once again pushed him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics 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 not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [and] that is painful because a refugee always has two hearts: 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 shelters, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In also, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. 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 capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country uncontrollable. 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 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] support almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt crucial nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children registered in school. New arrivals are documented by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

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

Some residents have taken on new duties with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and operate an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those wounded by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough resources or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs 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 sit 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 offering school meals, basic food distributions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only goods in a majority 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 quality of life.

Though Malha manages everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most vulnerable households, his heart yearns 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 suffer.

“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.”