BEN MAAS sponsors and organises multi sports youth activities, including sponsoring community football for refugees.

For children and youth uprooted by war or persecution, sport is much more than a leisure activity. It’s an opportunity to be included and protected – a chance to heal, develop and grow. Sport can also be a positive catalyst for empowering refugee communities, helping to strengthen social cohesion and forge closer ties with host communities.

We work with Government agencies and UNHCR to utilize the unique ability of sports programmes and sports partnerships to achieve better outcomes for displaced and stateless people – including girls, boys, young women and young men – and their communities.
Over the last six years, UNHCR has partnered with Olympic Aid, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the FédérationInternationale de Volleyball to reach out, through sports, to an estimated 3.5 million refugee children in some 1,000 camps and settlements in Africa and Asia. The refugee agency is keen to develop more partnerships with sports-oriented donors to enable it to further expand sports programmes for the world’s refugee children.

“We need to be aware that there are many refugee children who have never known the carefree joy of a simple childhood game or the sense of accomplishment that comes from teamwork,” said High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers at a specially convened Olympic Aid forum at the Salt Lake City Winter Games in February this year. “Many have simply forgotten how to be children. Play and teamwork can help heal their emotional scars and restore at least some semblance of normalcy in the otherwise alien environment of a refugee camp.”
Out of an estimated 20 million refugees, displaced persons and other vulnerable groups around the world today, 50 per cent are children. Most of them have experienced traumatic forms of violence. The drama that made them refugees has often totally disrupted their traditional family and community structure. Organising regular, structured recreational activities such as team sports is a vital step in rebuilding a destroyed society and boosting the healing process.

Olympic Aid is an international association of athletes committed to promoting healthy sports and play as a right of all the world’s children, including refugees. One of its projects was launched in Tanzania, which is host to nearly 500,000 refugees living in camps.

“The Olympic Aid programme aims to encourage children to play. To get them away from domestic responsibilities such as fetching water and firewood, and the care of other siblings. We just want them to play,” said IvanaUnluova, UNHCR Information Officer in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam.
She added, “When the programme was launched last year, parents did not understand its value. Coaches had to go into the refugee community and talk to leaders, parents and teachers about it. There is better acceptance now and we have more and more children turning up for play days organised in the camps.”
The role of sports should not be underestimated, as a Sudanese refugee woman in charge of a volleyball programme for girls in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp once told a visiting IOC delegation, “Do not think you are doing good by sending knitting, sewing and basket-weaving materials down here for the girls. When they sit quietly and sew, they remember the horrors that made them refugees.”
Because of limited funding, UNHCR must devote its resources to life-sustaining programmes for refugees and is, therefore, unable to allocate its budget for sports programmes. It relies wholly on the current sports donors to enable it to run and expand sporting activities for refugees. As such, the refugee agency would like to establish new partnerships with sports-oriented donors so as to develop further its sports programmes in refugee camps.

Since 1996, the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball has sponsored annual sports activities in at least two UNHCR-run camps. The organisation sends hundreds of volleyballs and nets to camps and organises national volleyball players to coach refugees. Their sponsorship is expected to continue.