Millions of young people around the world grow up unable to build decent lives for themselves because they are denied their right to education. An estimated 120 million children in developing countries don’t have the chance to go even to primary school. The majority of those children are girls.

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Village school in Shaanxi province, China.

Denying girls their right to a quality education effectively denies them all other human rights and minimizes the chances of successive generations — particularly the chances of their daughters — to develop to their fullest potential.

In response to such a hurtful reality, UNICEF has teamed with FIFA to use the wide popularity and high visibility of football to help every child, including every girl, get to school and stay there. Together, they are developing women's football programmes, to help young women and girls develop the self-esteem they need to succeed in school.

UNICEF is also working with well-known football players to call attention to the plight of girls who have been abused or forced into child labour. Last year, four players from the renowned English team Manchester United -- David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Wes Brown and Ole Solskaer -- visited a UNICEF project in Bangkok that provides protection, education and training for girls as young as five who have been involved in child labour and who have been abused.

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	In Afghanistan, teacher Habiba Khilwati with some of the 90 neighbourhood girls and boys she teaches in her home-based school in Kabul.

“Meeting these girls face-to-face made everything much more real," said David Beckham. "All they wanted was to be loved and to have a future. UNICEF is able to help children around the world to have a future, and football can play a big part in that. I'm extremely happy that FIFA has decided to dedicate next year's World Cup to children - there couldn't be a better cause."

UNICEF in the field

In Brazil, UNICEF and FIFA integrated football into several school programmes to help enrol at-risk children and keep them in school.

And in Ethiopia, Kenya and elsewhere, the partners have sponsored programmes that use football as an education tool to teach children important lessons on HIV/AIDS, conflict resolution and other issues.