The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has provided 100 displaced persons with front-row seats to watch the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) in Cameroon.
Development Diaries understands that the seats were provided through the Football Together Activation Programme.
The programme also gave access to 50 children of displaced persons to meet the official AFCON mascot, ‘Mola’, and see the AFCON trophy up-close.
‘About 100 refugees – a few of them from Douala – threw their support behind Cameroon at Olembe’, UNHCR Communications Associate, Helen Ngoh tweeted.
‘Football Together gave them front-row seats. The power of sport in bringing people together’!
‘Among the guests at this prestigious event, a hundred refugees from the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo, [Ivory Coast], and Rwanda’, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) said in a post on its website.
‘They took their places in the stands, vibrating to the rhythm of the spectacle offered by the teams on the lawn’.
UNHCR’s primary mission is to safeguard the rights and well-being of people who have been forced to flee.
The UN agency works alongside its partners and communities to ensure that everyone has the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another country.
In its report on the Role of Sport in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations recognised sport as a cost-effective and flexible tool for promoting peace and development objectives.
‘We recognise the growing contribution of sport to the realisation of development and peace in its promotion of tolerance and respect and the contributions it makes to the empowerment of women and of young people, individuals and communities as well as to health, education and social inclusion objectives’, the UN noted.
Photo source: Xavier Bourgeois/UNHCR
