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Several mornings a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and permits him to check on the condition of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his native Timbuktu area.

After four years as a refugee, he returned home and worked for a year as a social worker before transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again pushed 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 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 longs to revisit one day.”

First established as a few thousand huts, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In furthermore, it is calculated that at least 154,000 refugees reside 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 capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left swathes of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop being concerned. 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 food or cash every month to about 53,000 … and had to stop vital nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

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

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

Some residents have assumed new responsibilities with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and run an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those maimed by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also spreading awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s demands are obvious.

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

“We’re still supplying school meals, staple provisions, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re focusing on the most at-risk while working relentlessly to obtain new funding through the expansion of our support network.”

The meals are supported by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping start business programmes to help refugees cultivate and rear animals so they can make money and enhance their livelihood.

Though Malha oversees everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ support the most needy households, his heart yearns 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 adequate, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“We appreciate 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 dignity.”