Second missing Kenyan child featured in AS Roma campaign found safe

The club were informed on Tuesday by the charity Missing Child Kenya that an eight-year-old girl, who was pictured in the video to announce Chris Smalling’s arrival from Manchester United, has now been reunited with her family.

The girl, whose identity we are now protecting, had gone missing four days before the video was posted across social media platforms in a town just over 30 minutes from Nairobi.

The news follows the revelation on Monday that another Kenyan child, a 13-year-old boy who went missing in August and who was featured in the Henrikh Mkhitaryan announcement video, was found safe on Sunday.

The eight-year-old Kenyan girl is the fourth child featured in AS Roma’s transfer announcement campaign this summer to have been found safe and well.

In August, a 15-year-old girl from London, who was featured in the transfer announcement video for Mert Cetin, was found safe.

On September 2, a nine-year-old boy from Belgium, who was included in the social media video to announce Davide Zappacosta’s arrival from Chelsea, was found safe and well.

Then this week, a 13-year-old Kenyan boy and an eight-year-old Kenyan girl have both been reunited with their families.

After launching the campaign on June 30, Missing Child Kenya became the first African organisation to partner with Roma to raise awareness of missing child cases in their country.

“Missing Child Kenya is anchored on hope,” said Maryana Munyendo, executive director of Missing Child Kenya. “I always tell all the people who share a post, retweet, like, comment or even say a prayer for the missing children that hope is what makes us keep looking for them to reunite them with family.

“Through our partnership with AS Roma, we lit a big candle of hope to guide these children back home to their families. My best moments are when we have to change the poster from ‘MISSING CHILD’ and update to ‘CHILD FOUND’.

“This partnership has channeled the passion and love that AS Roma fans have to enact change in child protection. AS Roma featured 17 Kenyan children in total over the summer – the videos in total generated more than 9 million views – and had a lot of coverage in Kenyan media.

“We are thankful to the Roma players that allowed these children to feature in this campaign alongside their announcements. The positive testimony of children found and reunited with their families gives strength to the power of communities working together, both in physical geographic spaces and increasingly in the digital space.”

In total, 17 children from Kenya were featured in the campaign, with only the United States and the UK having more children included in the announcement videos.

“This is incredible news for the children’s families and for Maryana and all the staff at Missing Child Kenya who are tackling this issue every day,” said Paul Rogers, Head of Strategy at AS Roma. “Roma worked very closely with Missing Child Kenya all throughout the summer to ensure that we could use social media to increase the public’s awareness of these missing children.

"We made dedicated videos specifically featuring only Kenyan children and also created videos that we could geo-target through social media only to a Kenyan audience. The Roma campaign with Missing Child Kenya was also greatly helped by the Kenyan media, in particular KTN and Standard Digital, who shared the announcement with over 3 million of their followers.

"Local Kenyan influencers, celebrities and Kenyan football fans of not just Roma, but also Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool, amongst others, were all instrumental in amplifying the campaign on Twitter. As we've ben told by all of the charities and organisations we are working with, every like, share or comment on social media greatly increases the chances of a child being found.”

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