As every school child knows, September is the month when the sun finally sets on the summer holidays and a new school year gusts in! But over 13.4 million children in the Middle East and North Africa will have no school place to go to.

Warning that the entire region was “going backwards in development terms”, Founder and CEO Dr Terence Ascott pointed to a series of grim statistics that underline the crisis across the Middle East right now.

Displaced from their homes and often unable to access healthcare, refugees are particularly vulnerable to an array of physical and mental health problems.

The New Year is marked with mourning rather than celebrating. The Cairo church bombing that took place in December 2016 was sobering.