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Traditional Shona ritual for opening the construction of the FFH Center in Mozambique, 12th September 2012:

About the Campaign:
“20 Centres for 2010” is the Official Campaign of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™. Its aim is to raise funds to create twenty Football for Hope Centres for public health, education and football across Africa. The centres will address local social challenges in disadvantaged areas and improve education and health services for young people.

Read more about The Football for Hope Campaign.

The Football for Hope Centre in Manica is the 12th of the 20 Football for Hope Centres in Africa.

Centre Host organisation: Grupo Desportivo De Manica(GDM)

Mission:

"To expand the real freedoms people enjoy so they can be able to choose to live the lives that they might have reason to value.".

About the Centre Host:

GDM is a sport and recreation club that was founded in 1980 by the community of Manica, in the province of Manica, Mozambique. In a time of brutal civil war; ordinary people expressed their need for social cohesion, hope and a belief that life under the Mozambican sun can be good.

26 Years later, the very same club, crippled by overbearing poverty and socio-economic challenges still held fast to their dream. Their building was dilapidated, but their pride and belief in a better life remained. And so in 2006 they partnered with the University of Johannesburg to start ‘operation reclaim the dream': a dream of a holistic club that use sport, specifically football to facilitate social change. The rest, as they say is history.

Sustainability Statement:
In the bioclimatic point of view the orientation of the building allows to emphasize the natural cross ventilation, which prevents costs with air conditioning. Also, the roof is suspended in both sides (east and west) providing shade, protecting to rain the biggest openings of the building and collecting water to a cistern located in the east courtyard that could be used for the toilets or plants irrigation. The concept is to combine and optimize local techniques with local materials.
For this the strategy is to participate in the evolution and modernization of the local construction processes without a rupture in the ‘’know how’’ of populations.
In Manica buildings are almost all constructed with earth bricks, so we propose also the use of bricks but in an optimized and contemporary version of this traditional system,compressed earth block/ CEB, that doesn’t require plaster finishing, minimizing the costs and maintaining the main advantage, the use of local earth and its properties, thermal
inertia.
This technique is also very easy to learn and diffused by local communities, which will contribute to the local construction modernization that uses at this moment fired bricks with low compressive strength and resistance to water, requiring the protection of plasters. This use of CEB bricks are less expensive that imported materials and techniques such as the local low quality fired bricks, concrete blocks (require plaster) and concrete walls. This minimizes the big problem of deforestation in Mozambique as well future maintenance costs.

Location