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Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and allows him to check on the welfare of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg rebels clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu region.

After four years as a refugee, he went back and worked for a year as a social worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg fighting once again pushed him across the border.

The former math and science 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 kids 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 split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

Originally planned as a few thousand huts, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In furthermore, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the number three human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. 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] help almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt essential nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a permanent 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 amplifiers to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, security patrols protect the camp from the threat of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new duties with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those wounded by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s requirements are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose 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, basic food distributions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most needy while working relentlessly to obtain new funding through the broadening of our donor base.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees cultivate and rear animals so they can generate funds and boost their livelihood.

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most disadvantaged 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 thank 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 self-respect.”