Kids and the World Cup

Blow your vuvuzela, get flag socks on your wing mirrors, make your way to a fan zone…the World Cup is about to arrive in Africa!

Around South Africa, the atmosphere is reaching fever pitch. Arriving in Johannesburg airport, the first thing I saw was a giant football floating in the air to let everyone know that this was a host city. Fans in all colours were queuing at immigration, the most memorable being a Mexican in his green shirt, big hat, comedy sunglasses and a replica trophy!

So who will win the World Cup? After my next flight to Cape Town, I was whisked to a church in a township that was participating in Viva’s World Weekend of Prayer. I asked the children of the township the same question, and was deafened by the shout of “South Africa!!”


I am privileged to be here for the whole month of madness. Although I’m usually based at Viva’s Africa office in Uganda, I’ve travelled down to work with our city-wide network in Cape Town as they make every effort to keep children safe during the World Cup. The Cape Town network brings together over 90 organisations in the Western Cape area to work on the issues facing South Africa’s children.

One of the most pressing issues across the country is child sexual abuse, and the network members were particularly worried that all the football festivities would lead to an increase in this tragic problem. There is already an extremely high child abuse rate across the country and it is estimated that more than 40,000 people will be trafficked into South Africa during the World Cup to serve the whims of thousands of unscrupulous tourists and locals. South African President Zuma admitted this in a statement on World Cup trafficking, saying "Children wandering alone in shopping malls and football stadiums will be vulnerable to people with evil intentions.” On top of that, many girls looking to make extra money as waitresses or tour guides during the tournament will be fooled into the sex trade. Since the children have now finished school for the 5-week football break, the network has gone into overdrive working with other local community projects to try and ‘Keep Them Safe’.

The network is part of a community initiative to pull together all kind of different projects and churches across Cape Town to set up 13 ‘base camps’. These are 13 centres within communities which have games and play for primary school children in the morning, a workshop choice of performing arts, craft, sport or entrepreneurship for teenagers in the afternoon and big screens for everyone to watch matches in the evenings. One day a week the children will be reaching out through ‘compassion days’, leaving base camp to serve the needs of others. This means that not only will they be carefully looked after and supervised over the five weeks, and thus made much less vulnerable to those ‘people with evil intentions’, but they will also be taught valuable life skills to keep them safe from HIV/AIDS, child abuse and trafficking in the future. 200 local volunteers are facilitating the whole operation that is expected to reach out to over 1800 children and youth each day!

On the eve of the World’s greatest sports tournament and the most ambitious networking initiative I’ve been involved with, I’m looking forward to each and every part of it! Between the football matches and the network’s plans, ‘teamwork’ is certainly the name of the game this summer. So keep an eye on this blog to find out how these tactics help us reach our goal ...


~ E. on the road


Want to find out more about keeping kids safe?  Visit www.viva.org.

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