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Several times 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 residence since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and allows him to assess the condition of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg rebels clashed with the army in his native Timbuktu area.

After four years as a refugee, he went back and worked for a year as a community worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict 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 positioned 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 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 longs to revisit one day.”

Originally planned 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 live 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 settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, escaping a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts 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 adjacent settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt 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 trappings of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, security patrols guard the camp from the risk of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new responsibilities with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those maimed by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s requirements 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 recycle 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 largely basic, save for a few beans.

“We’re still providing school meals, basic food distributions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most needy while working continuously to secure new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only items in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can make money and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha manages everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most disadvantaged 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 rely solely on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“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.”