Rwandan youth set for Hope festival

Youths from Rwanda, Germany, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil are working on a common project to be presented in the frame of the ‘Football for Hope Festival 2010’ in Johannesburg. The Football for Hope Festival is an official part of the FIFA World Cup and this year, the festival will bring together 32 Youth-Delegations from the global network dubbed street football world. Speaking at the closing of the conference to work on the common project called Encounter Street Football, the director of KICKFAIR, Steffi Biester, said that the project was going to be used to show the world how, through football, peace can be built. KICKFAIR is a German NGO that works with football as a tool for education and social integration and it works on all levels from local to global. “Encounter Football Project is through the collaboration of all the youth from the five countries working on a film which they will use to tell their story to the world during the festival,” said Biester. “In their film, the youth tell their home-stories and how street football has changed their lives”. Speaking to the Sunday Times, Donatien Nsengimana who heads the Kimisagara Youth Centre (KYC) that is coordinating the project, said that the Football for Hope Festival 2010 was going to help them reach to a wider public and have a positive change to the world in Johannesburg. According to Nsengimana, the project is valuable, especially to the Rwandan youth, since it involves youngsters at the edge of society, socially under-privileged and in most cases, with low perspectives and many social problems. “The project will help them learn through social inclusion. It will also help them to have a creative mind since they are the ones who will work on the film themselves with some help from professionals,” he said. This, Nsengimana says, will help them acquire professional skills, not to mention social inclusion and teaching them responsible citizenship since they will be dealing with real life issues in their different communities. Ends