The project provides training to local sports coaches to teach children about peace-building, gender equality and to develop their social-emotional skills, with the aim of protecting them against forced recruitment. It will also raise funds to provide football kits and the restoration of football pitches.
Children Change Colombia has been working since 2019 with the Afro-Colombian Community Council ACADESAN in Chocó and Valle del Cauca to improve the quality of the education of their schools, enhance their ethno-education programs, prevent school dropout rates and implement environmental projects.
This project with ACADESAN and GIZ harnesses the power of sport to strengthen the socioemotional skills of children and young people in nine communities of the San Juan River area in Chocó. In doing so, we hope to prevent forced recruitment, sexual violence and sexual exploitation, as well as promoting gender equality and care strategies to prevent sexual violence.
With £30, we can give one child a full football kit and boots, £215 will pay to train five teachers on the prevention of child recruitment. A £450 donation will provide a whole team of children with football kit and boots and a £1,000 donation will allow us to restore a football pitch.
Context:
Prolonged violence and poverty in Colombia has led to the recruitment of tens of thousands of children into armed groups and gangs.
Colombian children and young people are recruited into armed groups either by force or under the impression that it will offer them an escape from grinding poverty. There, they are forcibly brutalised. Those who attempt to escape face paying for that decision with their life. Those who do manage to escape face severe stigmatisation and a lack of support to help them rebuild their life.
The current situation in Colombia: It is impossible for us to know the real number of children that have been recruited into armed groups.
According to official figures, nearly 18,000 children were recruited into armed groups between 1958 and 2020. During 2023 and 2024, nearly 300 cases of forced child recruitment were registered by the Ombudsman’s Office.
However, the violent world of armed gangs pose many other threats which extend beyond being formally ‘recruited’. This means that the real number of children who have suffered at the hands of these groups is likely to be much higher than official figures suggest.
