A 10-year-old child tried to commit suicide in a Greek refugee camp. Perhaps the most shocking thing about this story is that it is not new.

Routine police beatings and squalor in Moria, the largest camp on the island of Lesbos and home to about 8,000 people, have pushed the situation to breaking point.

Moria fails to meet just about every standard set by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). New arrivals are crammed into inadequate sports tents, or on to farmland where lighting has not been installed, and up to 190 refugees share one filthy toilet.

Last year, the mayor of Lesbos, Spyros Galinos, warned that the facility was starting to resemble “concentration camps, where all human dignity is denied”.

Yet Moria resides in plain sight, on a tourist island in the EU. It is full of people with the most extraordinary of life stories.

Refugees and migrants from Moria march towards Mytilene during a protest over the camp’s conditions. Photograph: Elias Marcou/Reuters

Francis was arrested and imprisoned in Burundi for allegedly supporting opposition protests. On his release he embarked on a 7,000km overland odyssey to Greece. He has not seen his wife for three years and has never met his youngest son.

Joseph’s journey was shorter – a direct flight from Kinshasa to Istanbul, followed by the notoriously risky crossing to Lesbos on an inflatable boat – but no less remarkable. A musician, he is famous in his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Greek authorities admit these people deserve better but claim a lack of money keeps their hands tied. As of July, the camp organisers had run out of tents and sleeping bags. Human sewage flowed freely across the main entrance. Yet the EU has allocated more than €1.6bn (£1.43bn) since 2015 to address the crisis, with extensive additional funds provided by national governments and private donors. European funding alone in 2017 worked out at €7,000 for every refugee living in Greece. That should cover the cost of a shared apartment and food, with change to spare.

The crucial question is: where has the money gone?

Some has never reached Greece. Of the €561m of long-term funding allocated by the European commission, only €153m has so far been disbursed.

This is partly because not all spending has yet been reported, but it is rumoured that Greece was unable to complete the strategic planning required for the release of funds. Of the money that did reach the country, much has been wasted. One official suggested up to 70% of the funds were misspent. While the EU commission has received no reports of mismanagement of funds, stories of waste are common. In Moria, it is said that the camp has received multiple temporary housing units that remain unused becausefunds to cover installation costs are lacking.

Money that was not wasted has been spent unevenly. More than €150m of emergency funding has been given to the UNHCR since 2017 to pay for some refugees to have apartments – while some in Moria don’t even have tents. On the ground in Moria, camp leaders seem overwhelmed by the crisis. The admissions process is chaotic, supply chains are broken and long-term planning is inadequate. The UNHCR and other major organisations left in 2016, leaving the operations to a group of 10 small organisations that lack the resources and capacity to do the job.

Women and children at the Moria camp. Photograph: Elias Marcou/Reuters

The blame cannot end there. Just 10 minutes down the road from Moria is Kara Tepe, another camp where conditions are better – partly because they cap numbers, closing their doors when full. Moria, by contrast, has been set up to fail. One theory is that the perceived lack of a plan is in itself a strategy. By keeping conditions bad in Moria, migrants and refugees warn friends and family at home not to come. Surely such a strategy cannot be worth the human cost.

But new arrivals show no signs of stopping. The situation is now evolving from the Syrian refugee crisis into a chronic clash between Europe and its unstable periphery.

UNHCR data suggests that 41% of the arrivals in 2018 were Syrian, while 20% were Afghan, 15% Iraqi, 6% from DRC and 18% from other countries.

These are countries suffering from long-term instability and insecurity.

So long as the border remains contested, we can expect camps like Moria to stay. While refugees and migrants continue to arrive on Lesbos, fixing reception facilities remains an urgent priority. At the very least, those who wish to return home should be able to do so easily.

Many people arrive at camp to find out that their asylum claim has no chance of success and the promise of a better, less harsh life will never materialise. Keeping them trapped in Moria is cruel and wasteful.

More importantly, the conditions must improve. Unusually for a humanitarian crisis, there is no shortage of money to fix Moria. What is missing is the capacity and political will to make it happen. The EU commission must analyse why it has so little to show for its huge investment in Greece and should shift its focus to improving capacity.

But Greece is leading the operation and so it is on Greece to lead us out of it. Some Greek institutions are indeed acting. This week, the governor of the north Aegean issued the ministry of migration with a 30-day warning to clean up the camp or face closure.

This is the wake-up call the ministry needs. Given there is little hope of imminent improvement, why not transfer the people currently stuck in Moria to the mainland while work is undertaken to improve reception accommodation there and across the Aegean islands?

To do this, the Greeks must be humble. They must recognise – and fix – their management shortcomings, and be far more open to outside help. For their part, the European commission and other international organisations must be ready to provide it.

UNHCR standards are met by camps in Asia and Africa. It’s time they were met in Europe too.

• Sebastian Leape spent this summer volunteering in Moria refugee camp. The names of refugees referenced in this article have been changed to protect their identity