By Uche Dozie, kick442.com
As the effect of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic rages on, the need to assist the health sector to combat the deadly disease is paramount that has seen professional footballers keyed into this since the pandemic started.
France international Moussa Dembélé has jumped on the bandwagon of players who have showed kind gestures at this time and taken his help to his fatherland in Mali where he is has pumped in paid in £180,000 to build a medical centre.
Moussa Dembélé has birth roots in Mali
The medical centre is situated in Kobiri; a village where his father had lived while growing up.
The Olympic Lyonnaise striker visited Kobiri in 2018 where one of his relatives told him about the difficulties that people have to go through just to get a medical diagnosis.
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The experience of the visit ignited the player’s desire to help as he opened a maternity hospital in July 3, 2019, and since then, 95 births have taken place at the hospital.
Dembélé has helped oversee the project which provides first aid, nursery and maternity care — which again highlights the work done by footballers on a global scale.
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The Mirror reports Dembélé has previously helped to fund football pitches in Kobiri and the 17 surrounding villages.
He has also donated protective gloves, masks, and hand sanitizers for the hospital.
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Going forward, he will help to provide ambulances for the hospital.
Dembélé, born on 12 July 1996, was developed at Paris Saint-Germain and Fulham and made his professional debut for Fulham in the Premier League in November 2013, and totalled 19 goals in 64 competitive matches for them before joining Celtic in 2016.
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Dembélé helped Celtic win consecutive Scottish domestic trebles, before moving to Lyon in August 2018.
Dembélé has earned over 50 caps for France at youth level as part of the France under-19 squad which reached the semi-finals of the 2015 European Championship, scoring in group stage victories over Ukraine and hosts Greece.
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He made his debut for the under-21 team in October 2016, coming on as a second-half substitute and scoring one of France’s goals in a 5–1 win over Georgia.
On 13 November 2017, Dembélé scored an 11-minute hat-trick for the France U-21 team in a 3-1 away win over Slovenia, which was the forward’s 7th goal in 10 games for the international outfit at the time.
The hat-trick was also the quickest treble by a player in any French age group for 15 years.