Migrants working abroad and sending back money is one of the biggest and often most overlooked forms of financial aid to poorer countries - often greater than formal overseas aid. The Pew Research group has estimated an annual flow $574bn (£413bn) of such remittances being sent back from migrant workers to their families.

Broken backboards could have meant the end of the basketball season at the National Institute of General Francisco Menendez, a high school in El Salvador, and the school, known by its Spanish acronym Inframen, simply didn't have enough money to fix them. So the association of former students of the school, mainly living in the US, purchased the new backboards.  These ongoing donations are fuelled by the nostalgia and higher purchasing power of Salvadorans who have migrated, the majority now in the US.

More than two million Salvadorans live outside the country, but they continue to keep close ties to their place of birth, sending back more than $4bn (£2.9bn) last year. El Salvador's economy relies heavily on these remittances, which made up 18% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017.

In September 2019, an estimated 200,000 Salvadorans will lose an immigration status known as temporary protected status (TPS) that has allowed them to work legally in the US since a deadly earthquake hit the country in 2001. Interior deportations, meaning deportations of people outside border regions who have typically been in the US for years, have increased by 34% under the Trump administration.

School budgets are already under pressure and the loss of migrant money would mean another financial worry. Furthermore, El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world outside a war zone, with just under 4,000 homicides last year.

Read the full article about aid to El Salvador by Anna-Catherine Brigida at BBC News.