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Many times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp elder healthy in mind and body, and allows him to assess the welfare of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg insurgents battled 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 becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again forced him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic 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 not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [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 hopes to go back to one day.”

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

Government officials say the area is the number three human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, fleeing 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 services the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop vital 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 long-term settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children signed up in school. New comers are processed 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 adopted new duties with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and manage an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s demands are evident.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough financial support 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 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 almost plain, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still supplying 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 needy while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent contributions 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 launch self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can earn an income and improve their standard of living.

Though Malha manages everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ assist 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 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.”