Festival da Bola 2014: Football shapes the future

By their very nature, sporting events have enormous potential for bringing people from different backgrounds together, generating interaction and drawing a wide range of spectators. During the 2014 FIFA World Cup, German development cooperation actors used the daily sports camps as a means of leveraging the potential of this major sporting event to promote sustainable development and showcase the huge potential of sports for development through demonstrations and tournaments.

Consequently, the sports camps incorporated festival events to coincide with match days. These events were held close to the venues where the German national team played in Salvador da Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Fortaleza and Porto Alegre. The “Festival da Bola 2014” offered visitors from the worlds of sport, policy-making, culture and media a colourful programme focusing on the enormous potential of football for offering new prospects to the young participants and their communities.