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Many mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and enables him to assess the welfare of other inhabitants.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg insurgents fought with the army in his native Timbuktu area.

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels especially sad for the young people of Mbera, which is situated approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [and] that is difficult because a refugee always has dual loyalties: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell 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 settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop worrying. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have severely slashed funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] support almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money 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 bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 shops, and volleyball and football activities. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children enrolled in school. New entrants are registered 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 assumed new responsibilities with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network look after those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also raising awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s demands are evident.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough funding or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs 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 sit by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few beans.

“We’re still offering school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most needy while working continuously to secure new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are funded by recent contributions 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 business programmes to help refugees cultivate and rear animals so they can make money and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha manages everything dutifully, helping the aid workers’ cater to 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 rely solely 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.”