Lifetime Citizen Portal Access — AI Briefings, Alerts & Unlimited Follows
UNICEF unveils "Every Play for Every Child" platform at World Football Day event
Loading...
Summary
At a United Nations commemoration of World Football Day, UNICEF announced a new global platform, Every Play for Every Child, to coordinate sport-based programs that advance child protection, education and health and to solicit public- and private-sector partners.
Lisonbee Qualta, UNICEF’s global strategic partnerships manager for sports and entertainment, announced the Every Play for Every Child platform during the United Nations General Assembly’s inaugural World Football Day commemoration at UN Headquarters in New York. Qualta described the platform as an effort to consolidate UNICEF’s sport-related programming and invite funding and partnerships from both public- and private-sector actors.
“Sport is also a right of every child,” Qualta said, citing Article 31 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a framing principle for UNICEF’s approach. She said UNICEF counts roughly 250 football-based programs in more than 99 countries and that the agency intends to align those efforts under the new platform to improve coordination, fundraising and program scale.
Qualta outlined the program areas UNICEF expects to use football to advance: child protection, social inclusion, mental and physical health, immunization outreach and education. She cited examples from UNICEF’s work: use of football to create safe learning spaces in Jordan’s refugee camps; a girls’ program called FC Futures in Namibia developed with Electronic Arts; and programs in Venezuela supporting children on difficult migration routes.
Qualta said UNICEF has already used footballers and football campaigns to support public-health and child-protection messages, citing a recent case where a player participated in a vaccination-awareness campaign in Côte d’Ivoire. She asked potential partners to help fund and scale the platform and said UNICEF will invite both private-sector and public partners to participate.
The announcement positioned Every Play for Every Child as both a communications and program tool. Qualta emphasized football’s cross-cutting potential: “From WHO, ILO, UN Women, UNAIDS, UNESCO, UNDP, UNEP, we were all apart together, and we all cared about this same powerful sector called sports,” she told delegates, describing past UN interagency work on sport and development.
UNICEF will publish further details about the platform’s governance, funding model and initial geographic priorities; Qualta’s remarks invited interested governments, federations and private-sector partners to engage. The agency did not provide a complete budget or a timeline for full rollout during the event.
