Latest news with #MCCFoundation
Malaysian Reserve
4 days ago
- Business
- Malaysian Reserve
SIR JIMMY ANDERSON UNVEILS DP WORLD'S SUPPORT FOR GRASSROOTS AT HOME OF CRICKET
LONDON, June 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — DP World, the international logistics business, today brought its Beyond Boundaries Initiative to Lord's cricket ground with the help of England legend Sir James Anderson. Rashid Abdulla, CEO & MD, Europe at DP World said, 'Bringing the Beyond Boundaries Initiative to Europe for the first time is a proud milestone for DP World. In partnership with the ICC and MCC Foundation, and enabled by our supply chain solutions capability, we are helping to expand access to the game by supporting grassroots facilities across the region.' The delivery of 250 cricket kits in a repurposed shipping container comes ahead of this week's ICC World Test Championship Final, of which DP World is the Global Logistics Partner. The kits – each including a bat, pads, gloves, and helmet – will be distributed to schools across Britain in partnership with the MCC Foundation. 'It's great to see the support of an ICC partner extending to the grassroots game around the world and now arriving in the UK ahead of this week's final,' commented Sir James Anderson. 'Opportunity and access are everything in growing cricket here, so DP World's provision of kits to the school system is a huge moment.' The initiative will continue to be bolstered by a kits-for-runs scheme during the test match between South Africa and Australia, just as has been active at all ICC pinnacle tournaments since the initiative's launch. Anurag Dahiya, Chief Commercial Officer of the ICC, added 'Partnerships don't take a more authentic form than the staunch grassroots support DP World has shown. The Beyond Boundaries Initiative has already impacted lives in New York, Namibia and beyond – and now it's making a difference at the heart of cricket tradition.' Angus Berry, Director of Operations for the MCC Foundation, said: 'We feel a responsibility to the grassroots game in this country and beyond. This collaboration with DP World, arriving at Lord's ahead of the ICC World Test Championship Final, underlines our shared commitment to creating access and opportunity for all young cricketers.' To date, the Beyond Boundaries Initiative has delivered 12 repurposed shipping containers, distributed 3,000 cricket kits, activated programs in 8 countries across 4 continents, and empowered over 15,000 young people to play cricket. Photo – – View original content:
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
SIR JIMMY ANDERSON UNVEILS DP WORLD'S SUPPORT FOR GRASSROOTS AT HOME OF CRICKET
LONDON, June 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- DP World, the international logistics business, today brought its Beyond Boundaries Initiative to Lord's cricket ground with the help of England legend Sir James Anderson. Rashid Abdulla, CEO & MD, Europe at DP World said, "Bringing the Beyond Boundaries Initiative to Europe for the first time is a proud milestone for DP World. In partnership with the ICC and MCC Foundation, and enabled by our supply chain solutions capability, we are helping to expand access to the game by supporting grassroots facilities across the region." The delivery of 250 cricket kits in a repurposed shipping container comes ahead of this week's ICC World Test Championship Final, of which DP World is the Global Logistics Partner. The kits – each including a bat, pads, gloves, and helmet – will be distributed to schools across Britain in partnership with the MCC Foundation. "It's great to see the support of an ICC partner extending to the grassroots game around the world and now arriving in the UK ahead of this week's final," commented Sir James Anderson. "Opportunity and access are everything in growing cricket here, so DP World's provision of kits to the school system is a huge moment." The initiative will continue to be bolstered by a kits-for-runs scheme during the test match between South Africa and Australia, just as has been active at all ICC pinnacle tournaments since the initiative's launch. Anurag Dahiya, Chief Commercial Officer of the ICC, added "Partnerships don't take a more authentic form than the staunch grassroots support DP World has shown. The Beyond Boundaries Initiative has already impacted lives in New York, Namibia and beyond – and now it's making a difference at the heart of cricket tradition." Angus Berry, Director of Operations for the MCC Foundation, said: "We feel a responsibility to the grassroots game in this country and beyond. This collaboration with DP World, arriving at Lord's ahead of the ICC World Test Championship Final, underlines our shared commitment to creating access and opportunity for all young cricketers." To date, the Beyond Boundaries Initiative has delivered 12 repurposed shipping containers, distributed 3,000 cricket kits, activated programs in 8 countries across 4 continents, and empowered over 15,000 young people to play cricket. Photo - - View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE DP World Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Telegraph
27-04-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
From mud hut to Mujahideen to MCC: One woman's incredible journey
Many comments have been made on the subject of whether England should play cricket against Afghanistan while their women are barred from playing at all. Yet few outsiders are as qualified to speak as Dr Sarah Fane. The chair of the MCC Foundation worked in Afghanistan for 20 years and was among the first to organise cricket in the country, thereby helping sow the seed of perhaps the most surprising growth in the history of sport. After all, Afghanistan have now beaten the country that invented cricket, England. Fane won an OBE for her work in Afghanistan, before Western governments pulled the plug and left the country in the clutches of the Taliban. Her journey started decades earlier, when she decided to follow her GP father into the medical profession. 'Family had a bearing on everything I've done in life,' she says. 'I went to a village in rural India in my gap year [in 1981]. The head of this water project told me I wasn't going to change the world but it would change me. I lived in a mud hut and had to learn Telugu, and as the only other white woman they had seen was a nurse, they came to my mud hut to ask me to deliver their babies. After two terms of French and Latin at Bristol University, a friend said, 'When are you going to do what you should do and become a doctor?' I didn't have a science A-level so it was a lot of hard work.' In the late 1980s she was in Pakistan, where tribesmen in the North-West Frontier Province would have been surprised to see a tall white woman on horseback. So surprised, in fact, that Fane was forced to dress as a man to work as a doctor for refugee women and children among the Mujahideen, who were fighting the Russian invaders. 'The Mujahideen treated me beautifully,' she says. 'Men wanted their girls to go to school so they could bring in an income' After returning to the UK and having four children, she went back to Afghanistan in 2001, working in a mother-child clinic in the Panjshir Valley and in hospitals where doctors operated under canvas after the Taliban had bombed them. Her visit prompted her to found the charity Afghan Connection in 2002. Back then the number of girls going to school in Afghanistan was about 5,000 (no misprint, five thousand). With help from British donors and the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, she set about building schools, twinning them with schools in the UK and funding teacher training. 'The key was to listen to the communities and one of the important things was to build a wall around these schools so everyone felt safe, and fathers were happy for their girls to attend,' Fane says. 'No amount of talk about human rights and female rights was going to change the population, but once men saw women bringing in an income they wanted their girls to go to school. Even in remote areas, we reached the point where the girls were completing their education and going on to university, midwifery schools and teacher training colleges for the very first time. People wanted schools everywhere.' And Fane founded dozens, to which was added the secret ingredient: cricket pitches. Fane organised her first cricket camp in Afghanistan, in 2009 in Jalalabad, with the aid of MCC funding. Club member Matthew Fleming, a former England white-ball all-rounder, was there to see it. 'It never rains in Jalalabad but on the morning of this camp it deluged and I was in tears,' Fane says. 'Then the sun came out and crowds turned up at the university, and so did the entire Afghan team whom I had persuaded to come. The children, who didn't even have a pair of shoes, were given cricket kit and met their heroes. From then on our projects took off. It wasn't just cricket for boys, but the deaf and blind and those with other disabilities, and for girls, who had taught themselves by watching men on TV.' With support from MCC, the Foreign Office, and generous individuals, they went on to build more than 100 cricket pitches across Afghanistan. Every time they built one, they delivered coaching and allocated funding to the school to upgrade facilities. At the same time, Afghanistan were moving up the International Cricket Council's divisions, having begun by playing Japan and Jersey. 'Many say those years were wasted,' Fane says about the period up until 2020, when she read the warning signs about the Taliban's advance and closed her charity down, as these schools had become self-sustainable. 'So many young people in Afghanistan wanted to seize the opportunity to rebuild their country, as engineers or doctors or teachers and it is an absolute tragedy what has happened. But millions of children were educated during that time, and you can't take away that education from them, and as history changes that will re-flower. Girls will be educating other girls now, even if not in school.' When Fane became chair of the MCC Foundation in 2020, she had a team of three that had been focused on providing free coaching and matchplay for state schools in Britain. Now her team consists appropriately of 11, and this charitable arm of MCC delivers something priceless for tens of thousands of boys and girls around the world, from the UK to Lebanon to Nepal and Rwanda and soon Brazil: self-esteem and joy. 'Afghan women cannot be silenced' The foundation has also recently started the Global Refugee Cricket Fund and the first project it will support is Pitch Our Future, which did so much to get Afghan women cricketers to Australia. The ICC has also recently announced a taskforce to coordinate funding, coaching and facilities for displaced Afghan players. 'You should always go on the facts you know, and I know for a fact that the former Afghanistan Women players now living in Australia want to play cricket. If we can support them and keep the flame alive, their refugee team should thrive and some of them will go on to play for Australia or for T20 franchises around the world,' says Fane. 'They will be the role models who show that Afghan women cannot be silenced, and that will bring great comfort to Afghan girls. 'Since the withdrawal back in 2021 we have no leverage with the Taliban. But what must be done, and all I can practically do, is to seize this moment when the world seemingly cares greatly about Afghan women and do something to help where I can. Part of that will be our support for the Afghan Refugee Team in Australia, but I am planning much more to use this momentum to truly support Afghan women across the world and other refugees through sport and all we can attach to that in a meaningful way. The moment is now and I am determined.' Recently Fane flew to Beirut to support another project the MCC Foundation helps to fund. The Alsama Project has taken cricket to Syrian and Palestinian refugees, girls every bit as much as boys, and used it as a bedrock of their education. In the four Alsama schools in Lebanon the pupils who play cricket perform better than their contemporaries who do not: better self-discipline, longer concentration, higher attainment and so on. Divide and rule was Caesar's dictum and that of subsequent empires. Deport and rule is becoming the vogue of modern governments. Fane offers an alternative vision: integrate, educate and live.
