Playing for Peace: How football Is building common ground in Nigeria's IDP camps

Nearly 3 million people remain displaced in Nigeria as a result of the terrorist group's insurgency, and youth unemployment runs deep, with over a third of young people neither in education nor employment. In the Karamajiji and Area One IDP camps in Abuja, Cross Cultures Project Association (CCPA) is working with two Nigerian partners - the All Nigerian Football Players Union (ANFPU) and the Hadassah Davis Foundation (HDF) - on a programme called “Playing for Peace,” built on the premise that a football pitch can become genuine civic infrastructure, not just a place to play.

The approach draws on Cross Cultures' Open Fun Football Schools methodology, developed in 1998 to rebuild trust between divided communities in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since then, the organisation has reached over 1.8 million people worldwide, built a volunteer network of more than 107,000, and helped stand up more than 2,500 youth-led grassroots associations. What distinguishes the Nigeria programme is not the methodology itself, but how deliberately Cross Cultures, as the lead organisation, is building the capacity of its local partners, ANFPU and HDF, to design, manage and eventually lead this work themselves - through structured training in project-cycle management, financial administration, monitoring and fundraising.

ANFPU brings an existing track record, having already trained 190 volunteers who have engaged 4,000 children. HDF contributes something ANFPU could not offer alone: trusted relationships with more than 1,500 women and children inside the camps, and expertise in psychosocial support. Together, the partners are working toward formal engagement with Nigeria's Football Association, regional federations and the Ministry of Youth and Sport - anchoring the programme institutionally so it can outlast the funding cycle.

“We are not just running football sessions - we are training the next generation of community leaders, and building the institutions that will carry this work forward long after any single project ends,” says Abdul Sule, President, ANFPU.

At the centre of the programme is a cascading leadership model: 70 young men and women aged 18-30, most of them themselves unemployed, are trained as leaders and coaches, who go on to mobilise and train 60 additional volunteer coaches and 60 teenage coach assistants. Through this network, the programme reaches 4,000 children from diverse ethnic and displacement backgrounds. In a predecessor project supported by UEFA, a group of volunteer coaches with no prior fundraising experience independently organised a Fun Football Festival in a new state on their own initiative - an early sign that the model builds genuine agency, not just attendance.

HDF's inclusion as a women-led Nigerian organisation is an added value, with at least 50% of youth participants and children reached now targeted to be women and girls, guided by a jointly developed gender inclusion strategy. The same trusted relationships built through weekly football sessions also underpin the programme's advocacy work: community dialogues with religious leaders, football federation representatives and parents to challenge misconceptions about girls in sport and strengthen child safeguarding practice.

For a sector that has seen plenty of sport-for-development programmes come and go, what makes “Playing for Peace” worth watching is the underlying bet it is testing: that the most durable peace infrastructure in a fragile, displacement-affected context is not a curriculum or a facility, but a network of young people trusted to lead it themselves.