Fergus Drake can pinpoint the exact moment when, as a 10-year-old, he decided he wanted to do something to help the poor and underprivileged around the world.

He was watching a news report on the television.

“I remember a guy in a truck looking down and seeing a woman carrying a bag of wood but when he jumped down, he could see it wasn’t a bag of wood, but the woman’s seven-year-old son who was on the point of death.,” he says.

“The driver immediately got a glove out, filled it with baby formula milk, cut a hole in the end of a finger and fed the child and saved its life.

“I remember seeing that report and thinking there could be few things more value-added and fulfilling than humanitarian aid and relief work.”

It wasn’t just the report on the 1984 Ethiopian famine that inspired him to help others.

He explained: “My father had done work for the VSO aged 18 and talked of going to Tanzania as deputy leader of a leprosy mission, only to become the leader after a week when the leader died of leprosy.

Fergus was born in the Cumberland Maternity Hospital, Carlisle, when his dad John was general secretary of the Fisher Street YMCA in the city centre and mum Barbara was a peripatetic teacher.

The family moved to London when he was just two as his dad established the huge London Central YMCA on Tottenham Court Road.

They lived in a penthouse in the 12 storey building, but were forced to move when the IRA exploded a bomb in the car park in 1978.

The Drakes settled in Norwich and it was there that young Fergus was inspired to take up a career in humanitarian aid.

During his gap year before university he worked for a charity in Pakistan and then while at university he worked at an orphanage in Beirut and helped with the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995 which left more than 6,000 dead, over 43,000 injured and around 300,000 homeless.

After leaving university he joined the civil service working for the Ministry of Defence and then moved to the Tearfund charity, helping to build 20 schools in Liberia at a time when warlord Charles Taylor was president and .

In Kenya, he was involved in Operation Lifeline Sudan which saw 60,000 tonnes of grain airlifted into the drought-wrecked country each year for four years.

He spent eight years with the Save The Children charity, heading up work on child poverty in the UK, then international development work, before becoming director of global programmes with a budget of £280m and 5,000 staff.

Before that, he worked in Rwanda for the Office of former Prime Minister Tony Blair helping Rwandan prime minister Bernard Makuza to implement his government’s priorities across the country and offer advice on how he could oversee his ministers.

He joined the Crown Agents international development company as chief executive in 2017, attracted by the breadth of work it does, its history in helping poor and struggling nations and the positive impact it has.

Among its many roles is to ensure services that we take for granted and expect every day actually function.

Such as supply chains of food, medicines and educational items. The group teaches civil servants in African states to co-ordinate and to stay bribe and corruption-free.

The organisation recently helped break up a corrupt health supply chain in Ukraine. The government was sourcing all the drugs needed for the country through a small group of suppliers, with just three firms supplying all child cancer drugs.

He says: “We have opened that up to over 90 firms and we have been able to save $50million over three years, which means the country has been able to buy more medicines and drugs.

“The mortality figures related to cardio deaths has dropped by 20 per cent across the country.

“We also run a health fund that supplies drugs and medicines into Sudan that supplied over 10 million southern Sudanese and over 1,000 primary health care units and hospitals.”

At a time when there is increasing pressure on the government to reduce or even scrap foreign aid and investment, he offers a reminder that it helps boost foreign trade - and also reduces the risk of terrorist groups starting up or growing.

“If you are building connections with countries to boost their technology, help them provide better quality of care in education or social care, that is only a good thing - to help people thrive.

“British people have a long history of being very generous, be that through Live Aid, Comic Relief or some other appeal. There is a very generous British spirit. These are future trading partners. We want countries to be more prosperous for our and their own good. We do not want more failed states around the world. We don’t want more Somalias and Afghanistans.”

The aid chief says there are concerns about western Africa and the security of states such as Mali, Niger and north east Nigeria.

Meanwhile, Syria and Yemen continue to places of interest and concern for charities and humanitarian organisations such as the Crown Agents

There will never be no work for such groups and Fergus says there are plenty of opportunities for people to get involved - particularly younger people.

He advises: “If you get the chance to do a gap year before or after university, there are organisations that can give you a start.

“I think you get more out of university if you go in a bit older and wiser and have done a bit of international travel. There are lots of books to give you an insight into aid working with the United Nations and Non-Governmental Organisations and increasing numbers of people like to get a masters degree in development studies.”

The 44-year-old father of four now lives in Essex and his importance in humanitarian aid is such that he is a new addition to the latest edition of Who’s Who.

He said :”I did not realise it was such an august club.”

The ‘Bible’ of the most prominent people in the country, Who’s Who, contains more than 34,000 autobiographical details of those referred to as “noteworthy and influential people in every area of public life”.

Listing in the heavyweight book is by invitation only and to be included is regarded as an honour.

Everyone accepted into Who’s Who is invited to compile his or her own entry, so the listings can include as much information or as little as the personalities wish.

His entry takes up eight modest lines and lists his recreations as : “travelling the world, arthouse cinema, losing at chess to my children.”

Certainly trips in recent years to North Korea, the Sudan and in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak of 2014 can’t be judged to be holiday trips but he says: “You never cease to be amazed by the generosity of people in these places and in such challenging environments.”