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A number of days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha journeys at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in south-eastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The activity keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and enables him to assess the condition of other occupants.

His initial stay in Mauritania occurred in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists battled with the army in his native Timbuktu province.

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

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

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have never even seen Mali,” he says. “They do not know their country [and] that is painful 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 shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the UN refugee agency. In furthermore, 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 number three human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business capitals.

Each month, thousands more refugees pour in across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – particularly at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] assist almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue essential nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” 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 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use loudspeakers to get more children registered in school. New entrants are documented by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, police patrols protect the camp from the threat of militants just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new duties with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food 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 expectant mothers while also spreading awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s demands are clear.

“We have the determination, we have the women, but not enough resources or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the demands 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 cluster by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is mostly unseasoned, save for a few legumes.

“We’re still offering school meals, basic food distributions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most needy while working relentlessly to secure new funding through the expansion of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate entrepreneurship programmes to help refugees farm and rear animals so they can generate funds and improve their quality of life.

Though Malha oversees everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most vulnerable 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 adequate, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you endure hardship.

“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 dignity.”