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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator mentally and physically fit, and allows him to assess the wellbeing of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg rebels battled with the army in his home Timbuktu region.

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young inhabitants of Mbera, which is located 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 heartbreaking 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.”

First established 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 live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

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

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

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop crucial nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the trappings of a permanent 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 loudspeakers to get more children registered in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, security patrols guard the camp from the danger of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s requirements are clear.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough resources or materials,” 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 gather by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is almost plain, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still providing school meals, staple provisions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most at-risk while working relentlessly to acquire new funding through the broadening of our donor base.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only goods in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate business programmes to help refugees grow crops and keep animals so they can earn an income and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy 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 sufficient, 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 pride.”