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July 15, 2022
World Taekwondo (WT) and the Asia Development Foundation (ADF) have teamed up to launch the WT-ADF Cares Program in Mongolia (East Asia), Kyrgyzstan (Central Asia) and Timor-Leste (Southeast Asia) for a one-year period. The initiative helps to empower disadvantaged youth, such as orphans, reformatory inmates and street children, in developing countries in Asia through taekwondo training and Korean language lessons.
The 2022-23 WT-ADF Cares Program has been divided into three themes for each country with a focus on its unique issue area for disadvantaged youth. There are more than 1.1 billion young people aged 15 to 29 living in Asia and the Pacific, representing more than 25% of the population. The International Federation has carried out its Cares Program since 2016 with the aim of “providing taekwondo to those in need and to empower the powerless in developing countries.”
According to UNICEF, Mongolian children can be held in pre-trial detention facilities for up to 18 months for minor crimes and they may not be equipped to fulfill children’s rights and needs. Additionally, approximately 13,500 children live in orphanages in Kyrgyzstan even though 94% of them have at least one living parent. Furthermore, in Timor-Leste, GBV is the largest category of crimes reported to police, with 59% of women aged 15-19 experiencing intimate partner violence at least once in their lifetime.
Under the theme, “Bright Future with Taekwondo”, the Mongolia WT-ADF Cares Program kicked off last week for approximately 200 inmates in Ulaanbaatar, the country’s capital. The Kyrgyzstan program will run under the slogan “Dream through Taekwondo” and assist 150 orphans – 75 in Bishkek and 72 in Cholpon. The final project is run in cooperation with the Timor-Leste Taekwondo Federation under the theme “Building Self-Resilience through Taekwondo”. The Timor-Leste program will benefit around 60 orphans and 40 female domestic abuse victims in Dili City.
The program is already underway in Nepal, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. The 2019 project benefitted Nepalese reformatory inmates and female domestic abuse victims, Sri Lankan street children and war orphans and Cambodian victims of trafficking and slavery and street children. In 2020, WT and ADF partnered to expand the program from 2020-21 with a donation of $150,000, a second of its kind after the first donation of $90,000 for the 2019-20 Cares Program.
Last year, program students in Nepal, Cambodia and Sri Lanka participated in the first online Taekwondo Championships, along with ten refugee children from the Azraq Syrian refugee camp in Jordan and students from 20 countries including the US, Haiti, India and more. Organized by GCS International Portland, USA Chapter and the U.S. World Class Taekwondo Association, the four-day virtual event included over 300 athletes. The aim of the event was to champion underprivileged children from developing countries and give them hope to dream through the sport of taekwondo.
WT plans to start new Cares projects in late August 2022 in Afghanistan and in Nepal for students at the Um Hong Gil Human Foundation school near Pokhara.
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