“A moving story”: Baumgartner honoured for social commitment | OneFootball

Christoph Baumgartner has made an impressive start to the new season with two goals and an assist – and on Wednesday, the Austria international returned to Leipzig from national team duty with a special trophy in hand. This time, though, it wasn’t his footballing achievements that took centre stage.

“I have the opportunity to help”

“When you look beyond your own world, you realise that not everyone is as fortunate as we footballers are,” he explained. “As a professional footballer, I live an incredibly privileged life and I have the opportunity to help others. That’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

In 2022, Baumi founded a vocational training centre in Kakule, Uganda, to support women in the East African country. “Uganda has a moving history. One of the biggest issues today is that there’s hardly any access to contraception, which means women often become pregnant and can’t rely on financial support from the fathers. As a result, they have to give up their education – if they were even able to attend school in the first place – to care for their children,” explained the 26-year-old.

The idea to get involved in Uganda came through a friend: “A friend of mine brought the situation in Uganda to my attention. He had visited the country, got an overview and spoken to people there. From the very beginning, it was important to me to be fully behind the project – not just to donate money somewhere without knowing what’s actually happening.”

Giving women a chance

The initial goal was to give women a genuine opportunity to gain an education. “It developed really well within a short space of time and we realised that the next logical step was to hire more teachers to educate the women’s children. The whole project continues to grow and evolve.”

Today, 80 children between the ages of four and nine attend the Baumi Junior School. In addition to his commitment to education, our number 14 also launched a fundraising campaign to renovate 12 water wells. Thanks to this initiative, 35,000 people now have permanent access to clean running water.

Christoph Baumgartner

The RBL midfielder was, of course, delighted to receive the European Fair Play Diploma, which was presented to him ahead of Austria’s fixture against San Marino – even though he had deliberately kept the project out of the public eye for a long time.

“It’s not about promoting myself or getting good PR,” said Baumi. “But we’ve now decided to make the project public so that we can make an even bigger impact locally.” Further projects are already being planned: “Our big goal for the coming years is to build our own school and restore more wells – and every donation helps.”

Haidara: “Baumi, what you’re doing is incredible.”

The Austrian has received plenty of positive feedback from his teammates: “Of course, the lads are interested. Especially those who have a personal connection to Africa often talk to me about it. Doudou Haidara, for example, came up to me and said, ‘Baumi, what you’re doing is incredible. It doesn’t directly affect you, yet you’re supporting people in Africa.’”

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