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A number of mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern 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 check on the welfare of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his native Timbuktu area.

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

The former math and science teacher says he feels particularly sorry 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 homeland [and] that is painful because a refugee always has dual loyalties: 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 hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In furthermore, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government officials say the area is the third-biggest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country lawless. 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 discontinued USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt vital nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a established 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 loudspeakers to get more children enrolled in school. New arrivals are documented by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, police patrols protect the camp from the danger of militants 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 firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s needs are evident.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” 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 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 largely basic, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most needy while working relentlessly to secure new funding through the diversification of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees cultivate and raise animals so they can make money and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, 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 sufficient, 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 dignity.”