* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
This weekend, matches across Europe will raise awareness about the Sahel crisis, but will they lead to much-needed action?
By Megan Rowling
Can football succeed where U.N. officials, politicians and aid agencies have, well, not exactly failed, but had a somewhat limited impact?
From March 30 to April 2, the “Professional Football Against Hunger" campaign will play out in hundreds of European football stadiums, spreading the message through national league matches that action is needed now to avert a hunger disaster in Africa’s Sahel region.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that by the time the final whistle blows in the last match on April 2, “the campaign's message and activities will have swept across the continent from Glasgow to Vienna and from Málaga to Novosibirsk, involving 300 professional football clubs in 20 leagues throughout 16 European countries, reaching millions of football fans”.
"Football is the perfect vehicle for highlighting the plight of the people in the Sahel," Kristalina Georgieva, Europe’s aid commissioner, said in a statement. The European Commission is one of the organisations promoting the campaign, together with the Association of European Professional Football Leagues (EPFL) and the FAO.
More than 15 million people across several countries, including Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Mauritania and Burkina Faso – many of them farming and herding households – are at risk of a food and nutrition crisis caused by drought, chronic poverty, high food prices, displacement and conflict.
Aid efforts across the region are less than 40-percent funded, the United Nations said on Wednesday, adding that the situation is deteriorating “at an alarming rate despite commendably early action by governments and international aid agencies”.
“This is already an appalling crisis in terms of the scale and degree of human suffering and it will get worse unless the response plans are properly funded,” said John Ging, operations director of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), after a week-long visit to the region. “It’s a matter of life or death for millions who are on the brink.”
Given the urgency, you’d think the organisers of the football against hunger campaign might also ask fans to dip into their pockets to help plug the shortfall. But that’s not going to be the case.
RAISING AWARENESS NOT CASH
Calls I made to FAO and ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian aid division, reveal that the initiative is aimed at awareness-raising rather than fundraising – not least because ECHO is not a charity and does not have an institutional mandate to ask for cash.
Rather it is a donor, spending money contributed by EU member states. And the soccer campaign is mainly viewed as an opportunity to show European taxpayers what humanitarian work it supports with their money.
A minute-long video spot to be shown at this weekend’s matches mentions the support that’s been offered so far by ECHO and FAO to “help people feed themselves today” and to prepare for tomorrow.
And there’s been no shortage of comments from top international football players like Patrick Vieira and Roberto Carlos about the need to unite to save lives in the Sahel. They’ve been out and about in force giving press conferences and speeches to highlight the escalating emergency.
All of which must do some good in terms of sounding the alarm. But sympathy isn’t really what hungry people need. If awareness doesn’t translate into action, it’s surely a wasted opportunity.
The video could at least point people to a website with information about how to donate money to aid agencies working in the Sahel region or lobby politicians to do more to ease the crisis. It doesn’t – although it does display a dedicated twitter feed: #FootballvHunger.
And even if you do find your way to the Professional Football Against Hunger or Ending Hunger websites where the materials for the campaign are hosted, there’s nothing specific about how individuals can take action on this particular emergency.
“Together we can save lives,” exhorts the campaign’s slogan. But it risks an own goal unless the organisations behind it can guide the people they reach towards doing something concrete to help.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
