FEBRUARY 23, 2016
An eight-year old girl, Salma from Cairo, Egypt has won IKEA’s global drawing competition for children. A total of 55,000 children participated in IKEA’s Good Cause campaign to design their dream toy. In return, IKEA will reward the top 10 winners by developing their drawings into real soft toys to be sold in its stores globally.
Salma’s winning drawing was a yellow bird which was described as ‘clear and direct oozes of the child’s imagination’. She heard about the competition from her mother and decided to participate, since drawing and colouring are her favourite hobbies.
The top 10 winners of the competition, launched in November 2015, also included children aged from five to nine from Thailand, Indonesia, Spain, Hong Kong, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Turkey and, Canada, as well as Egypt.
In collaboration with UNICEF, this is the second year that children from around the world have participated in creating IKEA’s new soft toy collection for its ‘Good Cause’ campaign, which focuses on children’s right to play. For every soft toy sold during the campaign, IKEA Foundation will donate one Euro to children’s education projects through UNICEF and Save the Children programme.
“For many children, soft toys are a comfort, a best friend and a sense of security. Not only do we want to inspire young children and encourage creativity, we also want to trigger compassion within our consumers and their children to inspire them to support social responsibility throughout their lives. The amount of designs we received is overwhelming! The creativity is universal, and children in all countries seem to be inspired by similar things: dinosaurs, birds and monsters. The personalities are really strong with their winking eyes, feet that go in both directions and wonderful combinations of features. They really draw from their own head and do not copy from elsewhere,” said Adosh Sharma, Country Manager, IKEA Egypt.
Over 10 million children have benefited from the Soft Toys for Education campaign since it was launched in 2003. Over the last ten years, the campaign supported over 90 projects in 46 countries and raised 57 million Euros, and 9.3 million Euros in 2012 alone. These funds are used in improving school infrastructures, access to water and sanitation facilities, training teachers, and providing school benches, desks and educational supplies.