All 23 socio-sports schools run with Cruzada por los Niños took part in the Gorongosa National Park.
NEWS.23/11/2023
A delegation from the Real Madrid Foundation and the NGO Cruzada por los Niños has attended the launch of the football tournament involving 23 social sports schools in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park.
The tournament shows how sporting activity can be used as a tool for education and literacy among the participants. This is one of the central events at this program, aimed at avoiding premature school drop-out among girls in order to give them better choices about their own futures.
The Real Madrid Foundation project with Cruzada por los Niños is located in the villages surrounding the Gorongosa National Park in the Sofala province near to Beira, Mozambique’s second city. The program is run in several communities around the park’s buffer zone, 7 communities in the Nhamatanda District, 10 in Gorongosa, 3 in the Dondo District and another 3 in Cheringoma.
The area has high iliteracy rates, particularly among women, as well as child marriages, a lack of sex education and high levels of transit across the border with Zimbabwe and the port of Beira, among others. In this context, the Real Madrid Foundation has been running a program with Cruzada por los Niños since 2018 that focuses on health and education, using sport as an integrational tool for girls and their families. This is helping to promote significant societal growth in the communities in the buffer zone. Other projectsLikewise, the Real Madrid Foundation’s delegation visited the other two projects being run in Maputo in collaboration with the Salesian Missions and CESAL. These are consolidated programs that use sport as a tool for an education in values, in a context of high population density, a significant lack of basic services such as access to water and sanitation, or educational and recreational activities.