How football is changing lives in Uganda
|Karen Mukiibi is the Programmes Director for Youth Sport Uganda
We spoke to Karen Mukiibi, the Programmes Director for Youth Sport Uganda at the Africa Women’s Cup in Tanzania about how they’re using sport to tackle gender-based violence and encourage female participation in football.
Karen Mukiibi has risen through the ranks, starting as a social worker she’s now the Programmes Director for Youth Sport Uganda (YSU) – an organisation that started as a small community project in 2006 now nearly twenty years later, it is a fully fledged NGO.
YSU has grown and Karen’s title has changed but her passion and the message at the heart of the organisation is still very much the same – there’s a deep-rooted love for sport and a belief in its power to change lives.
Based in Uganda’s capital Kampala, YSU works predominantly with young people living in the slum areas of the city which are overcrowded and lacking in basic facilities. The topics they cover – sanitation, livelihoods, health and education - are practical and serious – but the methods are fun.
“We know they learn more easily when they play.”
“We use structured curriculums - unlike other organisations, we won’t use football as it is, instead we use modified bits of football, so we create fun games out of football and use these to deliver our key messages. We train coaches as well, so they’re the foot soldiers who deliver the programmes in the communities.”
To promote greater gender equality within sport and within their programmes, YSU have a unique approach to project enrolment - a target of 51% female and 49% male participants.
“We know that sport and football is not very accepted for girls in Uganda. If a girl plays football the parent will often tag them as spoilt and if they’re playing with boys, the parents will have a lot of questions and might even refuse them.”
“In [Uganda] sport is usually played in the evening - it’s very rare that you will find people playing sport in the afternoon. People believe that after we go to work and we are relaxing we play – but that’s also the time that gendered roles have to be done – fetch water for the home, clean utensils, cook dinner – which is done by the girls in the household which means the girls really have limited space to participate in football. That’s why when we’re rolling out our programmes, we are intentional about getting more girls.”
To help their programmes be accepted by the local communities, they also train previous female participants to become coaches and role models and reach out to local female community leaders to help promote the programme. All of this helps to put local parents at ease and encourage them to allow their girls to participate.
As well as working with Ugandan nationals, they also work with refugees who have been displaced from Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia and who are living alongside the local hosting community.
One of the issues which YSU is supporting girls with is gender-based violence (GBV) and helping to prevent it and respond when someone is a victim of GBV.
“We keep making this noise that Gender-based violence is real and we need to do something about it.”
“I believe gender-based violence in Uganda is deeply rooted in our social cultural norms which are patriarchal and put men above women. It finds first the situation is escalated by so many socio-economic issues so if it finds that in the family the woman is uneducated and not contributing to the finance of the household then they are at risk of gender-based violence (GBV), which is very common in the Ugandan communities.”
“We keep making this noise that GBV is real and we need to do something about it. Five out of ten women [in Uganda] have experienced a case of GBV in their lives – whether they’ll admit it or not, because of the shame attached to it, many women will not report it to the police.”
“We do a lot of prevention through building life skills among the young girls and young boys – because if the young boys recognise that the girls are human and they have rights as well, the cases of GBV within their generation should reduce.”
“We start with life skills such as self-efficacy, coping with emotions and stress, conflict resolution – which are key for preventing GBV. And we do that through sport. We also sensitise the parents and caregivers because we realised through various baseline surveys that a young boy would easily perpetuate GBV if they have seen it happen through a male figure in their lives.”
For those who have been a victim of GBV, YSU has key partnerships with local health providers, legal support organisations and mental health support so they can access help.
To address the issues facing Uganda, Karen explains there needs to be a change in the political approach – prioritising uprooting corruption and focusing on the younger generations.
“We have good policies on paper in Uganda, but the implementation is a problem because of the corruption. We have good schools – the teachers are well trained, but the materials never reach the school because somewhere the funds are being taken out by someone in the middle.
“Our leadership needs to be very intentional in uprooting corruption and make people more patriotic about the younger generation. We had a census and 75% of the population is under 18 – that is quite a risk – if they’re under 18 and they are dying of preventable diseases like malaria, diarrhoea and they are not being educated then the country is at risk in the next ten years because they are going to be the leaders, but they won’t have the background.”
Despite the challenges they face, Karen is determined that the future will be brighter for the next generation and looking at the current champions of the African Women’s Cup, the Ugandan players will be part of that change.
The Africa Women’s Cup took place in Arusha in Tanzania from 29-30th June 2024. As part of our interview series we also spoke to Ugandan player Shadia.
The tournament is part of a two-year FIFA Foundation funded programme which is bringing together four African Homeless World Cup member countries – Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – to raise awareness of gender-based violence and develop and implement a new curriculum to help protect vulnerable women.
Words & Images: Rebecca Corbett