Reclaim Childhood
This project's parent organization is Reclaim Childhood
It operates in Jordan
It uses Basketball and Football (Soccer)
Entered the Best New Project
More about Reclaim Childhood
Since the war in Iraq broke out in 2003, over 4 million Iraqis have been displaced, 750,000 of whom have relocated to Jordan, a country of merely 5.5 million people. The tremendous influx of Iraqi refugees into Jordan has shocked the country’s political and social infrastructure creating, according to the UNHCR, an unprecedented “urban caseload.”
Iraqi refugee children have been the worst affected. Instead of attending school, many work as child laborers, many girls as prostitutes, struggling to get by and left to their own devices to cope with the trauma they underwent before they left their native land. But it is not simply education that these young refugees have been denied; their childhoods have been stolen from them. Reclaim Childhood Inc is a new non-profit that seeks to extend the benefits of sport and play to Iraqi refugee girls, many of whom have been denied the most basic access to childhood due to their unfortunate predicaments.
Our goal is to realize what the UN Advisor on Sport and Peace, Adolf Ogi, explained most concisely: “For refugee children and youth there are few things more important than education and sport. They can make the difference between despair and hope.”