Pointing out how relentlessly ineffectual and unwaveringly awful central governments around the world are has become a key feature of most dinner parties. I also fear that it is something of an exercise in futility – like so much of what we engage in.

That’s not going to stop me.

My friends and associates are switched on and alert. They don’t need me to tell them that while the international development budget was ring-fenced at 0.7% of GDP under Cameron (the PM who infamously “augmented” a pig if Isabel Oakeshott is to be believed), it has been progressively reduced under Johnson, Truss and now Starmer. It currently stands at a meagre, miserable, measly 0.3%.

Has the world become a kinder, easier place to grow up in? Most definitely not. Earlier in the year, the word’s richest man was put in charge of the world’s biggest aid budget. Within days of taking up his post, he decimated it.

I could hold forth indefinitely on the results of that particular policy move. In essence, the Trump-Musk duo caused an immediate collapse in numerous US-funded humanitarian and relevant programmes; they disrupted global health and emergency response systems and created large funding gaps for partners and contractors. The result is humanitarian harm in fragile countries and increased geopolitical and domestic risk.

Street Child exists to address all of the above. Street Child exists to ensure that opportunity is as equitably distributed across the planet as talent. Street Child exists to ensure that children in war zones and countries affected by climate change-related disaster enjoy access to education in the same way as children in the global North.

But Street Child is quite literally having to do more with less. A lot more with a lot less.

What am I doing? Literally the same thing I have always done: I am asking you to forego that with which you can do without (your morning coffee, for example) and give the money to us instead. We will use it to train a teacher. Or build a school. Or provide a child in DRC or Liberia or Ukraine or Sierra Leone with that most basic of human entitlements: an education. And education, as everyone knows, is the key that unlocks everything.