Video: Mae Sot World Soccer Festival 2015

The Mae Sot World Soccer Festival involved a football clinic for the children to interact and work together as a foundation for peace building through fun, teamwork, and cooperation activities. Also, it involved a coaching clinic for local Thai and Burmese coaches to learn a positive coaching approach in which winning is not the only goal of playing football.

Mae Sot is a Thai town on the north western Thai-Burma border where many Burmese migrants have fled years of civil war, persecution, and poverty in their home country of Myanmar. Over the years, as migrant populations grew, so did the need to provide education for the increasing number of vulnerable "migrant children".

Although all Burmese migrant children are allowed to enroll in Thai schools, most of them have difficulty accessing the Thai education system for a number of reasons such as transportation, cost, and language issues. In response, the migrant communities began running schools, known as migrant learning centers (MLCs) to contribute to the educational integration of some of the 13,000 migrant children in Mae Sot alone.