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Several mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and allows him to monitor the wellbeing of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg insurgents fought with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

After four years as a refugee, he came back and worked for a year as a community worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg unrest once again compelled him across the border.

The former math and science 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 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 longs to revisit one day.”

Originally planned as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. 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 authorities 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 pour in across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country ungovernable. 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 shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have sharply reduced 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 discontinue crucial nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” 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 programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children registered in school. New arrivals are registered by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, police patrols protect the camp from the risk of armed groups just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have adopted new roles with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those wounded by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s requirements are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” 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 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 providing school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working tirelessly to obtain new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only items in a bulk of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start business programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can generate funds and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha oversees everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most vulnerable 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 are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is adequate, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“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.”