With its ethanol plants and sugar cane cultivation, Ribeirao Preto is quite an affluent part of Brazil. However, this city in the state of Sao Paulo also has its socially disadvantaged areas, and it is there that the Associação Pró-Esporte e Cultura (APEC), with the support of the FIFA Foundation, is carrying out its work.

The project being undertaken by APEC is called Bom de nota, bom de bola (Good grades, good athlete). With the support of the FIFA Foundation, it assists 120 children between the ages of 6 and 14. All are residents of the Jardim Florestan Fernandes neighbourhood, and almost 99 per cent of them attend public schools.

“The purpose of the project is to offer good quality physical-activity practice through educational sports-education methodologies in a socially vulnerable region, while also improving the physical conditioning and motor skills of the participants,” project coordinator Socrates Oliveira Junior told FIFA.com.

“For the most part we want to positively influence the personal development of the students through central pillars of the programme like respect, solidarity and cooperation. These pillars are also used in the other part of the methodology, in which the students make a self-evaluation of the application of these competences in the school, in the project and at home, while also being evaluated by their teachers.”

Students are evaluated bi-monthly and the activities, which can also include volleyball, basketball or handball, take place twice a week using the methodology “Football for 3” and “Social Training”.

In 2018 the NGO spent a few months in transition as it relocated its activities to a new venue. Now fully installed, everything is ready for the start of the 2019 edition of the project on Saturday 6 April with the participation both of last year’s students and this year’s new intake of children.