To More Years of Collaboration

It was back in 2009 when Dufry began its relationship with the international charity SOS Children Villages. What started with the sponsorship of a project focused on preventive care in Igarassu, a town located in the north east of Brazil and one of the poorest areas in the country, has evolved into long-standing and constantly growing support reaching more geographies and involving a greater number of Dufry locations. Now, a decade later, the partnership continues evolving with initiatives like Captain Dufry being added to the mix, to help raise additional and much needed funds that will help improve the living conditions of many children in need.

About SOS Children Villages

SOS Children Villages has over 70 years of history behind them. The first SOS Children’s Village was founded in 1949 by Hermann Gmeiner in Tyrol, Austria. As a child welfare worker, Gmeiner saw how children orphaned because of World War II suffered. He was committed to helping them by building loving families and supportive communities.

Today, SOS Children's Villages are active in 136 countries and territories around the world, helping hundreds of thousands of children each year through alternative care, family support, schools, health centers, and other community-based work.

SOS Children Villages' focus is around securing quality care for children in care. This means providing a safe and caring environment to enable each child to grow and reach their full potential. For this reason, the work of SOS Children Villages is mostly with communities and states to provide a loving home for children who need alternative care and to help prevent family breakdown. 
Their work is focused on keeping families together, providing alternative care when needed, supporting young people on their path to independence, and advocating for the rights of children.

Partnership with Dufry

Dufry continues supporting the Igarassu village in Brazil and, in 2020 alone, our donation benefited nearly 400 infants, young children and teenagers with their mothers and enabled them to join family strengthening programs focused on building self-esteem, improving gender relations and preventing domestic violence. During this decade, Dufry has also lent support to similar villages in Mexico, Russia, Kenya, Jordan or Spain.

The way SOS Children´s Villages works permits families to evolve and reinforce family ties, whilst giving the necessary attention to children. Mothers are given the opportunity to leave their children in the child-care center during the day so that they can go to work and earn a living for themselves, and opt for better work opportunities. At the same time, children in these day-care centers are included in childhood development programs as well.

Fathers, on the other hand, receive awareness raising support in connection with educational matters and are helped and encouraged to become more constructively involved in family responsibility, thus improving the overall quality of life for these families.

SOS Children Villages also promotes family strengthening programs, like the Dufry-sponsored program in Nairobi, Kenya. This program seeks sustainable and innovative ways to prevent family separation and address the situation of those children who are at risk of losing care from their biological family.

The pillars of this program are family empowerment and community empowerment, to achieve the ultimate development of children through provision of quality care and protection.

Community-based partners are strategically identified, assessed and engaged to help create a strong safety net around the vulnerable children and youth in the community.

Captain Dufry and SOS Children Villages

Captain Dufry opens a new chapter in our long-standing partnership with SOS Children Villages by opening up a channel of support for the charity via our customers. The initiative (covered in issue 36 of Dufry World) consists on the sale of a plush toy dog across 23 countries and the proceeds generated from the sale of Captain Dufry will be donated to SOS Children´s Villages. Simple, straightforward and hopefully an effective way to enable us to increase the support given to this charity.

Captain Dufry also comes along with other additional initiatives to further engage customers in supporting charities, like the opportunity to make donations – to SOS Children Villages or any other charity – using the Red By Dufry app.