The month, as it actually happened.

In June we served 3,490 plates across breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus 612 mid-morning milk-and-fruit rounds for the under-sixes.

Two burners on the main range failed in the second week and were repaired for $84. A donated chest freezer arrived on the 19th and immediately cut our shopping trips from four a week to two, because we can finally buy fish and vegetables in bulk when the market price drops.

Nine children finished the twelve-week supervised feeding track. Seven reached a healthy weight-for-age; two are continuing with fortnightly weigh-ins.

Our biggest single cost remains cooking gas, at $312 for the month. Grocery gift cards go straight into this line and are genuinely the most useful thing a donor can send us that is not cash.

Samuel Idris · Kitchen lead

Amina came to us at twelve, after two years of being passed between relatives who could not afford another mouth. She was quiet and extremely stubborn, in the way that turns out to be useful later.

At sixteen she chose the vocational track over the academic one, which we supported, and spent three years apprenticed to a tailor on Cass Street. Our part was small: the apprenticeship fee, a monthly transport allowance and a second-hand machine.

In April she rented a corner of a shop. In June she hired her first helper, a seventeen-year-old from the outreach programme. She measured me for a dress and charged me full price.

Nineteen of our older students are on a vocational track right now, in tailoring, welding and computer literacy. Each placement costs about $600 a year, all in.

Grace Adeyemi · Founder & Director

Over the last fortnight I saw 41 children for routine check-ups, treated eleven for malaria, four for chest infections, and referred three to the district clinic for tests we cannot run here.

The most common thing I treat is something that would have cost nothing to prevent a week earlier. The difference between a $9 course of treatment and a $400 hospital admission is usually about four days of noticing, which is why every child here has a health file and a house parent who reads it.

Tobenna, who is six, sat through a dental extraction without a sound and then asked whether he could keep the tooth. He could.

We are short on paediatric paracetamol and rehydration salts going into the rainy season. Pharmacy gift cards are the fastest way to fix that.

Nurse Miriam Tesfaye · Visiting nurse

For eleven months, the room shared by fourteen children in Family Group 2 leaked in two places whenever it rained hard. We moved beds. We used buckets. We kept asking.

Roof repairs are the least sponsored thing we do, because nobody wants their generosity remembered as corrugated sheeting. Unrestricted gifts to Where Most Needed paid for it: $1,840 for materials and four days of labour from a local crew who charged us below their rate.

It will hold for a decade. The children have stopped moving their beds when the sky darkens.

The next unglamorous item on the list is the water pump, which is on borrowed time.

Daniel Okafor · Programs lead

Every Saturday from ten until one, anyone under sixteen can eat at the gate. No forms, no questions. We served an average of 74 children a week last month.

The feeding point is also how we find the families that need more. Our outreach workers now support 62 households — mostly widowed or grandparent-led — with food parcels, a term of school fees, or a month of rent when that is the whole crisis.

Twenty-six of those households would otherwise have had a strong reason to place a child in care. Keeping a child at home costs us roughly a tenth of what residential care costs, and it is better for the child in almost every case.

If you want your giving to go further than it looks, this is the programme.

Joel Brennan · Outreach & volunteers