While ensuring boys and girls their basic right to play, football for development projects aim at increasing understanding of the issue for both kids and parents and safeguard children's rights. And it is the right of participation - by acknowledging the children's capacities - which will provide the conditions for a gradual process of awareness building.

Furthermore, as one of the United Nations' MDGs and a basic human right, the process of ensuring universal primary level education can only positively affect other problematic aspects worldwide. In that direction, education within football for development projects refers to all efforts made to increase awareness on several challenging global issues, whether these efforts take place in a classroom, on the benches of a football field after a game or through another 'external' activity linked with the core objectives of a programme.

In these different settings, participants may not only receive purely "academic" lessons, but will also receive education on social issues and the embracing of basic values, thus learning methods to help the development of their local/regional environment.

Additionally, within the scope of football for education belong initiatives for the overall promotion of education focusing on the female gender, given the considerable deprivation of this right to a considerable amount of girls and women worldwide, due to a number of socio-economic reasons. It is worth mentioning that, despite the advances having been made, girls still make up two out of every three children of school age in the developing world who do not receive a primary education (73 million of the 130 million out-of-school children).