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Several mornings 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 vigorous, and enables him to assess the wellbeing of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg rebels clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

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 compelled him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the young residents of Mbera, which is positioned approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have never even seen 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 hopes to go back to one day.”

Originally planned as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. 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 administrative and commercial centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt essential nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

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

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

Some residents have taken on new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and manage an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough financial support or supplies,” 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 provided one meal daily by WFP. At one school with 100 children per class, six or seven of them sit 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 offering school meals, basic food distributions, 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 secure new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can earn an income and improve their livelihood.

Though Malha oversees everything responsibly, 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 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.”