On November 4, 2008, we at Africaid marked World AIDS Day 2008 by hosting the most exciting WhizzKids United World Cup Tournament yet, at Durban's International Convention Centre - one of the city's finest venues!

Besides the tournament, the event featured players from Thanda Royal Zulu FC of the South African Premier League, an 11m climbing wall, a magician, and much more!  We are grateful to Altech-Autopage Cellular and ICC Durban for sponsoring the event, which we hope to hold annually.  Click here to read more.

Click the football to learn about different aspects of our programme

Thanks to the support of Abbott Labs and the Victor Daitz Foundation, we now have the funds in place to move forward with construction of our first teen clinic on the grounds of Edendale Hospital, Pietermaritzburg.

This clinic will be the first of its kind in South Africa, providing professional health and counselling services exclusively to adolescents.  Construction is expected to commence in January 2009.

In late August, six graduates of our Life Skills program had the once in a lifetime opportunity to travel to Germany for a street football festival hosted by streetfootballworld.  It was a life-changing experience for the kids!  Click here for more info.

In late September, WhizzKids United trained 16 new Life Skills trainers in a weeklong workshop.  These trainers are volunteers with the Sinosizo Project of the Catholic Archdiocese, and are now running WhizzKids United in several areas within iLembe District and eThekwini Municipality.  Click here to read more about the train-a-trainer workshop.

We are excited to join with our sponsor, Abbott Labs, to announce that our Life Skills course will be launching shortly in the United Kingdom!  The British manifestation of the programme will be called WhizzKids United FC.

It is great to see a social development programme out of Africa being exported to Europe instead of the other way around.

WhizzKids United has been working lately with Mr. Vuma Mfeka, Strategic Co-ordinator of the 2010 World Cup with the Premier's Office of KwaZulu-Natal.

As a result of this partnership we now have a mandate from the government to roll out our program throughout the province!

This is well underway as WKU is now operating in four of the eleven municipalities of KZN.  Click here to read about our roll-out in uThungulu District.

On August 14th we held a WhizzKids United World Cup Tournament in Ashdown, a township within Edendale, Pietermaritzburg.

This was, as usual, a great day for the kids to enjoy upon completion of the Life Skills course, but it also represented a milestone for us.  It was the 10th tournament we have held in Edendale since the program began piloting there in 2006.

Click here to read more.

The Football for Hope movement is the key element of a strategic alliance between FIFA and streetfootballworld, an organization devoted to social development through football.

With the FIFA World Cup coming to South Africa in 2010, this is a very exciting partnership and we look forward to working with FIFA and streetfootballworld in using football to bring about an AIDS-free generation in Africa.

 Durban artist Carin de Kock has created five beautiful paintings of WhizzKids at one of our World Cup tournaments based on portrait photographs taken by Jonas Steengaard.  The paintings are very large (1m x 2m) and do a marvelous job of capturing the children's emotions and energy. 

But best of all, Carin is putting the paintings up for sale to raise money for WKU!  They will be displayed in the near future at the International Convention Centre in Durban city centre.

Recognising WKU unique approach to HIV prevention and sharing the same goal of creating an AIDS free generation, Abbott have come onboard initially for two years providing core funds. These core funds will meet local staff costs and day to day running costs. At WKU we are absolutely delighted because meeting core costs is always a huge challenge.  Click here to read more and see photos.

Everytime you run a search using the EveryClick search engine , a few pence are donated to Africaid!

We extend our gratitude to our partners at The Life Channel for setting up this excellent fundraising opportunity on our behalf!

Our old website is still online, and can still be viewed here .