FIFA is taking the implementation of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ Legacy Fund to the next level with an investment of USD50 million in a series of social programmes.
FIFA will work in collaboration with Qatar and three global organisations, namely the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.
The objective of this fund and the multi-stakeholder partnership is to help FIFA deliver results beyond the pitch and support international organisations to drive positive social and developmental impacts across the globe.
For the first time, the FIFA World Cup™ Legacy Fund will be invested in:
- Refugees: By partnering with UNHCR, the Legacy Fund will support programmes that empower communities and promote resilience and self-sufficiency for some of the world’s most vulnerable people, with a view to enhancing access to basic services, improving social inclusion, and strengthening national systems.
- Public Health/Occupational Health and Safety: The Legacy Fund will foster initiatives that build on the role played by the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 for the promotion of health and wellbeing, extending to improving working conditions. FIFA will join forces with WHO to support ‘Beat the Heat’, a flagship initiative to safeguard the health and safety of high-risk individuals from extreme heat and the related occupational and environmental hazards in the context of climate change.
- Education: Together with the WTO and the International Trade Centre, FIFA will support the ‘Women Exporters in the Digital Economy Fund’, which aims to economically empower women entrepreneurs by leveraging the potential of digitalisation to help them access global value chains.
- Football Development: Aspire Academy and the FIFA Talent Development Scheme, led by Arsène Wenger, will collaborate in identifying promising young talents in remote areas in a number of developing countries, with the objective of giving more talent around the world a chance to shine.
‘The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Legacy Fund is a landmark project that builds on the unprecedented impact of the tournament from a sustainability point of view,’ said FIFA President Gianni Infantino.
‘We always recognised the power of the FIFA World Cup to impact positively within our country, the region, and around the world and that to harness its unrivalled potential, we needed to approach the event as far more than 28 days of football,’ said SC Secretary General HE Hassan Al Thawadi.
‘Sport can be a powerful channel of hope and empowerment for marginalised individuals and communities,’ said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
‘The worlds of sport and health must collaborate to create safe, clean, and healthy environments for all people engaged in the preparation, delivery, and legacy of mega sport events, including workers, athletes, spectators, and communities,’ said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
WTO Director-General Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said, ‘Through our ‘Women Exporters in the Digital Economy Fund’, this ground-breaking collaboration will help scale up capacity for women entrepreneurs seeking to use digital tools and platforms to access new opportunities and global value chains.’
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