Cricket Without Boundaries are excited to announce a unique cricket project, led by CWB and working in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and global development organisation Right to Play, will be delivered in Jordan, starting next week.

Five volunteers from CWB will be flying from the UK to Jordan to work with refugees - mainly those who have fled from the civil war in Syria - and the local Jordanian community. They will be using cricket as a platform to promote education for refugees and to develop new networks for cricket to grow.

You can follow their progress on their project blog here: http://cwbblogs.com/jordan18/

With so many refugees now living in Jordan, schools are struggling to cope with the numbers of children in need of an education. CWBs’ role will be to use our tried and tested cricket-based games to promote and direct children and their families to the support available. We’ll be using our Integrated Learning activities to listen to the children and to discover what more can be done to help them and their families now and over the coming years.

Working with UNHCR and Right to Play, it will provide a narrative to the refugee crisis that will help build an understanding of the complexities that displaced people and refugees face to a new audience of our wider cricket family and beyond. As cricket is a game for people of all abilities and backgrounds, and the volunteer team are really looking to introducing it to children and young people who have never played before sharing this wonderful game so all have the opportunity to get involved.

This will be a great opportunity for the charity to once again demonstrate how cricket can break down boundaries and deliver vital messages. We believe that cricket will help refugees settle into their new homes, get the education they so desperately need and put smiles back on their faces.

To help deliver this project in Jordan, the five CWB volunteers will be joined by four volunteers from Jordan and another from Kuwait.

In the last 10 years, across five sub-Saharan African countries, Cricket Without Boundaries has coached over 250,000 children, while delivering health messages on HIV/AIDS and FGM. In addition, over 3000 coaches have been trained, who continue to coach cricket and deliver the critical health and social messages.

Jordan currently provides refuge for over 740,000 refugees of nearly 60 nationalities registered with UNHCR. The vast majority of refugees, both Syrian and other nationalities including Iraqi, reside outside camp settings alongside their Jordanian hosts in urban and rural areas.

Julia Farman – CWB Equality and Inclusion Lead