GUCCI‘S UNICEF DONATION: Gucci is committing 300,000 euros to UNICEF’s education thematic fund on behalf of creative director Sabato De Sarno and its employees.
The goal is to support UNICEF’s education programs to ensure that every child has the fundamental right to quality education, focusing on the world’s most vulnerable communities.
In a statement, Gucci pointed out that “the global disruption to education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is without parallel and its consequences on learning and access to education are still impacting children’s learning today.”
To date, UNICEF’s education programming has contributed to help 37.9 million out-of-school children, including 251,565 children with disabilities, gain access to education, and to spread learning materials to 28.3 million children. In 2022, UNICEF’s outreach extended to engage 16.1 million adolescents across 89 countries, including 345,000 adolescents in humanitarian settings.
Gucci is a longtime UNICEF partner. During the decade 2005-2015, the Italian luxury company contributed to the organization’s work supporting, for example, the initiative Schools for Africa, with the aim to expand access to quality education to girls, orphaned children and those living in extreme poverty, influencing national education policy by working with governments and partners in several countries including Mozambique and Malawi, training more than 8,700 teachers and educators, erecting nearly 300 school classrooms, supplying 14,600 school desks, and constructing more than 1,800 water and sanitation facilities in schools.
Gucci is also a founding member of UNICEF’s Girls’ Empowerment Initiative, which aims to advance girls’ rights and well-being through health, education, social protection, water and sanitation.
From January 2018 to August 2019, as a founding partner of BeyGood4Burundi created by Beyoncé, in partnership with UNICEF USA, Gucci and Chime for Change supported the construction and rehabilitation of Water Access, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) infrastructure in targeted areas across Burundi, enabling 4,850 additional people to gain sustainable access to safe drinking water, benefiting more than 36,000 people since January 2018.
In December 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gucci donated $500,000 to UNICEF USA, adding a further $100,000 on behalf of the Gucci community in support of UNICEF’s work in preparing for the rollout of a safe vaccine.
The following year, Gucci announced a donation of 200,000 COVID-19 vaccine kits on behalf of all Gucci employees. The aim was to support UNICEF’s global, equitable delivery of the vaccine in the most vulnerable communities around the world.