Strategies for Engaging the Community

Tiempo de Juego, a grassroots organisation using sport with adolescent girls, created a social business project that gives participants and their mothers an opportunity to get training and work in a bakery. This provides families with incentives for letting their girls participate in sport activities. The organisation also involves mothers in sport activities: some of the mothers train every week, have their own Tiempo de Juego uniforms, and coach themselves as a ‘mums’ team. Most of the women have little/no experience with football, however, the opportunity to relax, see the conditions their girls are playing in, and enjoy camaraderie with other women in a safe space outside the home is a powerful strategy for gaining support.

Maitrayana is a non-profit based in Delhi, India that works towards their dream of a “gender-equal society in which girls and women can exercise their rights.” Their programme, the Young People’s Initiative, uses sport, particularly netball, to deliver life skills on Communication, Peer Pressure, Body Image, Menstruation, Financial Literacy, and Gender-Based Violence to adolescent girls and young women at community sites in Delhi and Mumbai. Girls not only attend sessions for sport and life skills, but also have the opportunity to become coaches for the organisation. Taking on these leadership roles, the young women coaches of Maitrayana are able to reach many more girls in their communities and teach them sport and important life skills, breaking down prejudices and misinformation.

The ICRW conducted a programme in Mumbai, India, called Parivartan, which engaged cricket coaches and mentors in schools and the community to teach boys lessons about controlling aggression, preventing violence, and promoting respect. The programme used peer-to-peer education, engaging young cricket captains to act as role models and educate their teammates on GBV and positive behaviours.

Football for All Vietnam (FFAV) trains local female teachers as coaches and referees for the local leagues. One example is a 27-year-old teacher named Ms. Phan Thi Tuyen at a primary school in Huong Tra district in Hue Province. Before joining, she was shy and not confident as a teacher, but once she became involved with FFAV, she became confident, independent, and active. She was chosen to lead and supervise the FFAV team participating in the Norway Cup in 2010, in Oslo, Norway. She was then recruited as a club developer and eventually became a facilitator for training other community-based football coaches.

BRAC Uganda hosts Community Leaders Workshops in the different communities where they implement the Livelihood for Adolescence Program (ELA Program). The ELA program is designed specifically to improve the quality of the life of vulnerable adolescents by organising them, creating spaces of their own and helping them develop a set of skills so that they can live and grow as confident, empowered and self-reliant individuals contributing to change in their own families and communities. The Community Leaders Workshops are events where prominent female figures from the community visit an ELA club to talk to the girls about sexual health, life challenges or a host of other topics. The girls can ask questions and make valuable connections to important and prominent women and create a network of mentors and advisors.

NOWSPAR (National Organisation for Women, Sport, Physical Activity and Recreation) partners with the national governing bodies of sport in Zambia to promote girls’ and women’s participation in sport throughout the country. Through this partnership they have access to professional athletes who can help them build support, as well as government officials whose support is essential to the sustainability of their programme. In addition, the Ministry of Education has offered NOWSPAR free office space in its building in Lusaka.

Gregoria Apaza is an organisation that addresses gender-based violence amongst indigenous girls and women. In addition to running life skills, employability, and sport programmes for girls and women, GA runs their own radio station. Named ‘Pachamama Radio’, the station features continuous coverage of issues critical to addressing gender in Bolivia. Several of the programmes are directed and emceed by youth and give girls the opportunity to share their voices with the community.

Girls and Football South Africa, an NGO based in Cape Town that works with adolescent girls using football and media, created a relationship with Banyana Banyana, the South African national female football team. Players from the team come to camps organised by the organisation and serve as role models, inviting the girls in the programme to national team games.