Roger Moore helps to kick-off an alliance to improve the future of children everywhere.

Article taken from
www.unicef.org

International celebrity Roger Moore's work for UNICEF has been extensive and ranges from increasing awareness about children's rights and visiting numerous projects around the world, to raising significant funds for the organization's work.

On 20 November 2001 he helped to launch a new alliance between world football governing body, FIFA and UNICEF. The partnership hopes to reach even more of the world's children through football (soccer), to promote and protect the right of all children to healthy recreation and quality primary education, and to encourage every adult to take action to build a world fit for children.

"Children learn some very important values through playing sports like football," he says. "Sportsmanship, of course, but they also learn to play together, to exercise their bodies and minds and for so many, football helps them get through something awful they have experienced, or keeps them away from something awful they might otherwise be doing."

He points to the innovative use of football to educate young people in a UNICEF-supported project in Kenya. "Football is being used as a language in that project," he explains. "And the vital message being communicated to the boys and young men is about safe sex, the use of condoms, and preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS."

Moore has kicked off games with children from Honduras to Slovenia and seen the pure joy that football can bring.

"You find children playing football everywhere," he says. "Almost any open space becomes a field and a group of children get together to play with a ball made of rags and the inner tube from a bicycle."

Moore speaks first-hand of the problems children face around the world, having served as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for more than 10 years. "My curiosity got the better of me after Audrey Hepburn introduced me to UNICEF," explains Moore. "I wanted to find out more than just the facts and figures, and the minute I saw what was left of ... [suffering] children and what was left of their bodies in many instances, I knew I had to work for children for as long as I was able."

The varied experiences Moore has had in visiting UNICEF projects around the world have stayed with him - from watching children play with a makeshift football to appreciating the wonder in the eyes of someone seeing a water tap turned on for the very first time to hearing how a community hopes for electricity so that their children can study after dark.

"In the makeshift schools, in the shelters where children can get a meal, maybe a wash and some basic education such as learning to read and write," he says. "In all the places I've been, what the children want is to be touched and hugged, and they want to be educated so they will be able to support themselves."

"We must do all we can to educate children, especially girls," he emphasizes. "Once you educate a generation of young people they are able to become self-sufficient and make significant progress for themselves, but until we educate every child, their chances are limited."

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