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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and permits him to assess the condition of other inhabitants.

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

After four years as a refugee, he came back and worked for a year as a social worker before transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg fighting once again forced him across the border.

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

“Some of the young ones who were born here in Mbera have never even seen 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 longs to revisit one day.”

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

Government representatives say the area is the number three human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that took over 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 supports the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. 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 provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop vital nutrition programmes for hungry 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 financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children registered in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols guard the camp from the risk of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new responsibilities with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and operate an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those maimed by jihadist attacks and expectant mothers while also raising awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s demands are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose 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 cluster by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still offering school meals, basic food distributions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working continuously to obtain new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice provided by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees cultivate and rear animals so they can make money and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha manages everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy households, his heart aches 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 pride.”