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Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and allows him to check on the condition of other inhabitants.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his native 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 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 homeland [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

First established as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In also, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third largest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts 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 feeling anxious. They have faced shrinking resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have drastically cut funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support 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 financial constraints,” 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 initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children signed up in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, police patrols secure the camp from the danger of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new roles with gusto: 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 support those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s requirements are obvious.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough resources or supplies,” 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 given 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 supplying school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most needy while working continuously to secure new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only goods in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping launch entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and raise animals so they can earn an income and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most disadvantaged households, his heart yearns to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you sacrifice everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you are entirely reliant on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“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.”