Barça and UNHCR announce alliance to defend rights of refugee children

Barça and UNHCR announce alliance to defend rights of refugee children

FC Barcelona President Joan Laporta and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, hope that the agreement will bring the cause of refugees to football fans around the world.

The Club and the Barça Foundation will collaborate with this humanitarian agency by supporting programmes to help children and adolescents who have been forced to leave their homes, contributing 400,000 euros per season for four joint projects. In this first season, the countries of action will be Colombia, Uganda, Turkey and Malaysia.

Last Tuesday, Barça and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), announced in Geneva the alliance that will unite them in defending the rights of refugee children and young people, which will be reflected on the jerseys of the men’s and women’s football teams. For the first time in history, the UN Agency logo will appear beneath the number on the back of the Blaugrana jerseys for the 2022/23 season, which were presented recently, in a gesture that will send a message of solidarity to the world in favour of the more than 100 million people who have been forced to flee their countries.

The event was held at the head office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva and was attended by FC Barcelona President Joan Laporta and the High Commissioner, Filippo Grandi. The two leaders were accompanied by the Institutional Vice-President of FC Barcelona, Elena Fort, and the General Manager of the FC Barcelona Foundation, Marta Segú, as well as representatives of the UNHCR Spanish and Catalan Committees.

“The agreement forms part of the priorities defined by FC Barcelona and its Foundation for this new phase of the Club that I have the privilege of presiding over: to focus on refugees around the world, which is one of the most serious problems that we are currently facing, with 100 million refugees or displaced people (according to UNHCR figures) to whom we need to respond. This figure has increased due to the crisis in Ukraine. With this agreement, UNHCR and FC Barcelona are making an extraordinary commitment to the world.”

Joan Laporta,President of FC Barcelona

The aim of the initiative is to raise awareness of the cause of refugees amongst football fans around the world, while the projects to be supported by the FC Barcelona Foundation are aimed at improving the lives of refugee children and young people. These projects will focus on education, health and equal opportunities, with a special focus on gender equality and diversity.  In order to achieve some of the most relevant Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), sports will be used as a tool to facilitate the social integration of refugee and displaced children with their host populations.

“At FC Barcelona we have a social awareness that soon allowed us to understand the power of sports in general and football in particular to improve the lives of children. In 2006, the Foundation began to use sports as the magical tool it is to help the most vulnerable children and young people.  And today, we are still at it, trusting in the magical power of sports in favour of education, health, violence prevention and conflict resolution, placing it at the service of one of the most vulnerable groups in the world: child refugees.”

Dr. Marta Segú, Director of FC Barcelona Foundation

The partnership will last four seasons and is a collaboration between FC Barcelona and its Foundation, the UNHCR humanitarian agency and the UNHCR Spanish Committee. Also announced during the event were the holistic projects to support refugee children that will be implemented jointly over the coming years.

‘I am sure that our fans will be very happy with this,’ says president Joan Laporta. ‘We have shown the world our heart and soul.’