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A number of mornings 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 exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and permits him to check on the wellbeing of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

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 unrest once again forced him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels especially sad for the young inhabitants of Mbera, which is located approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is difficult 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.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is approximated 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 number three human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that took over 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 services the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced shrinking 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 food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue essential nutrition programmes for undernourished 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 bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children enrolled in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, police patrols guard the camp from the threat of armed groups just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new duties with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and run an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 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, essential food aid, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to acquire new funding through the expansion of our donor base.”

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

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most vulnerable households, his heart longs to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you lose 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 pride.”