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Many times a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha treks at least 7 miles (11km) around the enormous Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his home since 2012. The routine keeps the 84-year-old camp coordinator healthy in mind and body, and enables him to monitor the wellbeing of other residents.

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

After four years as a refugee, he returned home and worked for a year as a community worker before transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg fighting once again forced him across the border.

The former mathematics and physics teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young residents of Mbera, which is positioned approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [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 longs to revisit one day.”

First established 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 approximated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui province. More than half are under 18.

Government authorities say the area is the third-biggest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the administrative and commercial hubs.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, fleeing a extremist rebellion that co-opted the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country uncontrollable. Aid workers – especially at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and adjacent settlements – cannot stop worrying. 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] help almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to halt vital nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to budget reductions,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a established settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football programmes. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children registered in school. New comers are processed by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, security patrols guard the camp from the danger of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new duties with gusto: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation farm produce for sale and run an firefighting unit putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those wounded by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also spreading awareness about educating girls.

But the camp’s needs are obvious.

“We have the will, we have the women, but not enough funding or materials,” 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 served 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 pulses.

“We’re still providing school meals, essential food aid, and financial support in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working continuously to acquire new funding through the broadening of our funding sources.”

The meals are powered by recent contributions 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 start self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and keep animals so they can earn an income and improve their livelihood.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ support the most vulnerable households, his heart yearns 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 sufficient, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you suffer.

“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.”