Sustainable Luxury, Beauty & Sport

PUMA and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) were joined  on January 06 by the Indomitable Lions – Cameroon’s national football team – with team captain Samuel Eto’o, to announce a strategic partnership to support biodiversity worldwide and specific initiatives in Africa.

The ‘Play for Life’ partnership will support the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity by raising awareness about habitat and species conservation among football fans and the general public during worldwide football events, including the Orange Cup of African Nations in Angola later this month and international friendly games leading up to the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. With 12 African football team sponsorships to its name and a history of innovation with Africa, PUMA is uniquely positioned to help drive this effort with UNEP.

The International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) is a global initiative launched by the United Nations for 2010 to help raise awareness on the importance of biodiversity and to encourage worldwide action to conserve plants and animals and the environments in which they live. The ‘Play for Life’ campaign focuses on Africa, a continent that hosts exceptional biodiversity.

At their ‘Play for Life’ press conference in Nairobi, Kenya, PUMA unveiled their key fundraising lever, the revolutionary new Africa Unity Kit – the world’s first ‘continental football kit’ designed to be worn by the 12 African football national teams that PUMA sponsors. These include the World Cup qualified teams Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Algeria who are headed to the Africa Cup of Nations’ with hosts Angola and the national teams of Egypt, Mozambique, Togo and Tunisia, as well as non-qualified federations of Senegal, Morocco and Namibia. Puma also sponsors some of the continent’s best players – Samuel Eto’o, Emmanuel Eboué and John Mensah.

The Africa Unity Kit has been approved by FIFA who have officially recognised it as the Official 3rd kit to be worn by those PUMA-sponsored African teams.

Before you finish reading that post, at least 2 children will have died of Malaria ! Acceptable, probably not !

Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a not-for-profit public-private partnership, established as a foundation in Switzerland in 1999. It is dedicated to reducing the burden of malaria in disease-endemic countries by discovering, developing and facilitating delivery of new, effective and affordable antimalarial drugs. Our vision is a world in which these innovative medicines will cure and protect the vulnerable and under-served populations at risk of malaria, and help to ultimately eradicate this terrible disease.