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A number of days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp leader mentally and physically fit, and allows him to monitor the wellbeing of other residents.

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

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 unrest once again forced him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the young residents of Mbera, which is situated approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is painful because a refugee always has two hearts: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In addition, 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 representatives say the area is the third-biggest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country uncontrollable. 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 being concerned. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop vital nutrition programmes for hungry 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 shops, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children enrolled in school. New arrivals are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

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

Some residents have adopted new roles with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or equipment,” 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 gather by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is almost plain, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working relentlessly to obtain 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 items in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees grow crops and raise animals so they can make money and enhance their standard of living.

Though Malha oversees everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support 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 adequate, 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 self-respect.”