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Many times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp leader vigorous, and enables him to check on the wellbeing of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his home Timbuktu area.

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 pushed him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the younger 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 difficult because a refugee always has dual loyalties: 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 also, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

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

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country lawless. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which assists the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop crucial nutrition programmes for hungry children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a permanent settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children enrolled in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, police patrols guard the camp from the danger of armed groups 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 manage an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those injured by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough resources or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 sit 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, staple provisions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to obtain new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start business programmes to help refugees cultivate and keep animals so they can generate funds and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most disadvantaged households, his heart longs to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you lose everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you depend only on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is sufficient, 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 self-respect.”