International aid has been in the news recently due to aid budgets being cut around the world. It’s a big, complicated topic and easy to feel confused, so here are 7 key facts and statistics to break it down.

Five years ago, as the war in Syria intensified, Ahlam Mohammad Issber fled to Lebanon with her children. “I was ready at a moment’s notice to put my three children in the middle of the floor and lay myself over them,” she recalls. “My middle child is very kind-hearted. He told me, ‘Mama, I’m not going to let you die. I want to die before you.’ That really affected me. I felt as if I had to do something for him; to take him out of those hard times we were living in.”