In Eastern Europe, Terre des hommes (Tdh) runs a project of recreational and sporting activities with a psychosocial target. The long term objective of the MOVE project is to combat exploitation and child trafficking by helping the youngsters to develop their self-respect and their feelings of belonging to their community.

Planned for a four-year period (2008-2011) in Romania, Moldova and Albania and backed by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the MOVE project aims at strengthening the personal, social, methodological and technical skills of community-based people working with youngsters (facilitators, sports teachers, primary school teachers, social workers and Tdh staff), so as to improve the quality of their work with children and also to improve the psychosocial wellbeing of the latter.

This project, with its slogan “Get up and MOVE”, puts the emphasis on everyone’s integration and the participation and self-expression of each individual. The methodology Movement, Games and Sport (MGS) is based on learning by experience and includes new ways of playing, like volleyball with water-filled balloons, or football where pairs are tied together by their arms. Other sorts of activities encourage children to work together in team sports, so developing their self-confidence, their sense of responsibility and cooperation. Contests of Fair-Play Football are organised between villages with the aim of promoting everyone’s integration, in particular the girls, and advocacy for protection of children is done at the level of the local media. Moreover, considerable work of accreditation for the MGS method is done in parallel in each country, so that local schools and communities – both places well protected from exploitation and trafficking – officially take over the methodology of the project before it ends in December 2011.

A short, 5-minute video, dynamic and in colour, has been made to promote the MGS methodology.

Places of intervention

Albania: Tirana, Korça, Elbasan, Durrës, Fier.
Romania; Bucarest, Craiova.
Moldova: Chisiniau, Soroca, Ungheni.

Beneficiaries at the end of the project

• 8,000 youngsters will have benefited from regular activities of the psychosocial type, selective Fair-Play Football contests or summer camps

• 800 adults in charge of youngsters will have had psychosocial training (between 4 and 8 days), based on Tdh’s Movement, Games Sports methodology and from several individual coaching sessions

Budget 2011

CHF 223,128.-