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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 home since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and enables him to assess the condition of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg insurgents clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

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 conflict once again compelled him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the younger people of Mbera, which is located 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 nation [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has dual loyalties: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he longs to revisit one day.”

First established as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In also, it is estimated 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 number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a militant uprising that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct 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 stop crucial nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to financial constraints,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the trappings of a long-term settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children enrolled in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols secure the camp from the threat of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new responsibilities with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and manage an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s needs are clear.

“We have the will, 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 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 almost plain, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still providing school meals, staple provisions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working tirelessly to acquire new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered 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 initiate self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees farm and keep animals so they can generate funds and enhance their standard of living.

Though Malha oversees everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most needy households, his heart longs 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 sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“We appreciate 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.”