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Several days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp elder vigorous, and enables him to monitor the condition of other occupants.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg rebels clashed with the army in his native 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 forced him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young people of Mbera, which is situated 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 heartbreaking 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.”

Originally planned as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now houses around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In furthermore, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees reside in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government officials say the area is the third largest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, fleeing a militant uprising that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country lawless. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

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

The camp has many of the features of a long-term settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children registered in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols secure the camp from the danger of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new duties with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and operate an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those wounded by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough funding or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs 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 gather by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is mostly unseasoned, save for a few beans.

“We’re still offering school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most needy while working continuously to obtain new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are funded 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 business programmes to help refugees farm and keep animals so they can earn an income and improve their livelihood.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist 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 depend only on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“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 dignity.”