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A number of days 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 routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and allows him to check on the welfare of other occupants.

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

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

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels particularly sorry for the young people of Mbera, which is located 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 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 dreams of returning to one day.”

First established as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In also, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

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

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, running from a jihadist insurgency that took over 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 assists the camp and neighbouring settlements – cannot stop feeling anxious. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now ceased USAID – have sharply reduced 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 discontinue 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 characteristics of a permanent settlement, including its own bank, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children enrolled in school. New arrivals are registered by aid workers and state agents using biometric systems.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols guard the camp from the threat of armed groups just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new duties with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and manage 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 needs are evident.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or equipment,” 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 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 largely basic, save for a few beans.

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

The meals are funded by recent contributions including several thousand tonnes of rice donated 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 grow crops and keep animals so they can make money and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha manages everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most disadvantaged 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 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.”