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Many mornings 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 dwelling since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp leader healthy in mind and body, and permits him to monitor the welfare of other residents.

His first stay in Mauritania happened in 1991, when he left Mali as Tuareg insurgents clashed with the army in his home Timbuktu province.

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

The former math and science teacher says he feels especially sad for the younger people of Mbera, which is located approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the children who were born here in Mbera have not laid eyes on Mali,” he says. “They do not know their homeland [and] that is difficult because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

Originally planned 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 calculated that at least 154,000 refugees live in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third-biggest human encampment in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees arrive across the border, escaping a militant uprising that took over the Tuareg rebellion and has since left large parts of the country ungovernable. 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 being concerned. They have faced dwindling resources as foreign donors – most notably the now defunct USAID – have drastically cut 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 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 established settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 stores, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use megaphones to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are processed by aid workers and state agents using fingerprint technology.

Nearby, police patrols secure the camp from the threat of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have assumed new duties with enthusiasm: 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 look after those wounded by jihadist attacks and pregnant women while also promoting awareness about schooling girls.

But the camp’s needs are clear.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough financial support or supplies,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we reuse 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 largely basic, save for a few pulses.

“We’re still supplying school meals, staple provisions, and monetary aid in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re prioritizing the most needy while working relentlessly to acquire new funding through the diversification of our donor base.”

The meals are powered by recent donations including several thousand tonnes of rice supplied by the South Korean government – the only products in a most of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees grow crops and raise animals so they can make money and enhance their quality of life.

Though Malha supervises everything responsibly, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most vulnerable 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 are entirely reliant 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 pride.”