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A number of mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp leader mentally and physically fit, and permits him to monitor the condition of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists 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 social 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 deeply sympathetic for the younger 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 country [and] that is difficult because a refugee always has two hearts: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he hopes to go back to one day.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third-biggest human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, running from a militant uprising that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas 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 dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue 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 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 arrivals are registered by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols guard the camp from the danger of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new duties with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and operate an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough financial support 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 cluster by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is mostly unseasoned, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still offering school meals, basic food distributions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most needy while working relentlessly to acquire new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are supported by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and keep animals so they can earn an income and enhance their livelihood.

Though Malha oversees everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most needy 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 depend only 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 dignity.”