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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the sprawling Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his dwelling since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator vigorous, and allows him to monitor the wellbeing of other occupants.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he escaped Mali as Tuareg rebels 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 community worker before becoming a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg conflict once again forced him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the younger residents of Mbera, which is situated 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 country [and] that is heartbreaking because a refugee always has two hearts: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he hopes to go back to one day.”

Initially conceived as a few thousand shelters, Mbera now hosts around 120,000 refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In furthermore, it is approximated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui area. More than half are under 18.

Government officials say the area is the number three human settlement in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, fleeing a jihadist insurgency that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which services the camp and nearby 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] help almost 90,000 people with both provisions or financial assistance every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue crucial nutrition programmes for malnourished children and mothers due to financial constraints,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the features of a long-term settlement, including its own financial institution, 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 registered in school. New entrants are documented by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols protect the camp from the danger of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have adopted new duties with zeal: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation cultivate food for sale and manage an blaze control team putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network care for those injured by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also raising awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s requirements are clear.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough resources or equipment,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we repurpose what little we have, but it is not enough for the requirements 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 legumes.

“We’re still providing 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 vulnerable while working tirelessly to acquire new funding through the expansion of our donor base.”

The meals are funded by recent gifts 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 launch business programmes to help refugees grow crops and rear animals so they can make money and enhance their livelihood.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ assist the most needy households, his heart aches 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 sufficient, 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 self-respect.”