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Several days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp elder healthy in mind and body, and enables him to assess the wellbeing of other residents.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg rebels fought 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 becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again pushed him across the border.

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

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he hopes to go back to one day.”

First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives 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 come across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

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

The camp has many of the features of a long-term settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children enrolled in school. New arrivals are documented 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 duties with enthusiasm: 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 spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough financial support or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs 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 gather by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few beans.

“We’re still providing school meals, basic food distributions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working relentlessly to secure new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are supported by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only goods in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start business programmes to help refugees grow crops and raise animals so they can make money and boost their standard of living.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most needy households, his heart longs to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you sacrifice everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you depend only 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.”