It all started on the streets
The street child world cup
Nafas is a social enterprise specialized in using football to empower children in need and working in rehabilitation.
The Street Child World Cup was due to take place exactly a month before the FIFA World Cup. A time when the public imagination had no space for anything but the national team. In the middle of this madness, would anyone pay attention to Nafas?
Young men living on the streets are usually written off as gangsters or junkies. But as the poor man’s sport, homelessness has a very different association in football.
In fact, many of the world’s greatest footballers started out as either homeless or living in extreme poverty. The streets gave them skills they’d have never learned on the pitch and their drive to succeed took them far.
So we could’ve taken the classic CSR approach and told a sob story, but instead we preferred to treat the Nafas kids like the national team they were. We didn’t want people to sympathize with them but rather cheer for them as football stars.