If you are allergic to fanfare you’d better bolt your doors and shutter your windows on September 25, because there is going to be a lot of it that day in the vicinity of the United Nations, when world leaders ratify the Global Goals for Sustainable Development. This is a genuinely big deal, of large consequence — let’s hope — especially for the poorest people on the planet, but you will be forgiven if some of you are rolling your eyes, or yawning, or worse.

Poverty is sexist: it hits women and girls the hardest, which is doubly ironic, because investing in them is the best way to end poverty.

At a time when Europe and the rest of the world are flailing in response to the massive refugee crisis in the Middle East, this hardly seems a time for grand commitments of any kind, unless it’s a commitment to stop stumbling over our own two feet.

Investing foreign funds can leverage domestic funds to improve basic health services and education for the poorest citizens, especially women and girls.

It’s a fair and pressing question. If we can’t handle what’s happening in Syria — if we can’t even get the nomenclature right, insisting on calling these desperate refugees “migrants,” as if they had just packed their suitcases and moved north for a change of scene — how can we possibly handle the more chronic, endemic humanitarian crises of extreme poverty and hunger and sickness? Who, exactly, do we think we are, launching another fanciful campaign?