Coaching for Hope in Southern Africa
In December 2008, CFH ran a week long training programme in Cape Town, South Africa, supported by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. This included a soccer and life skills coaching course for 30 adult trainers and another course to train up 13 young people from different children’s homes around the city to become peer leaders. The youth leadership course was the first of its kind for CFH. Both courses were held at the Marsh Memorial Children’s Home in Cape Town.
From 1st – 7th December 2008, 30 grassroots coaches travelled in from communities all across Cape Town to take part a week long coaching and leadership course organised by Coaching for Hope. They received top quality training in technical soccer coaching and also in the use of soccer as a tool to educate young people about life skills, substance abuse and HIV and AIDS awareness. The training was delivered by two top UK coaches - one from the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation and one from Queens Park Rangers FC. Terry Fogharty from Tottenham Hotspur explains: “The soccer based HIV and Substance abuse sessions are absolutely key to the problems many of the coaches face in their communities. The way they have been devised by Coaching For Hope is ingenious. In my 15 years as a coach I have never seen sessions quite like it!”
From 1st – 5th Dec 2008 13 boys and girls from children’s homes across the City of Cape Town took part in a ‘youth coaching and leadership’ course organised by Coaching for Hope in partnership with the Amandla Ku Lutsha League (AKL) for children outside family care.
The young footballers were trained to run soccer coaching sessions with other young people in their children’s homes. As they gain confidence and experience, they will have the opportunity to participate in further courses where they learn to integrate messages about health education and substance abuse into the coaching curriculum. This course was facilitated by the CFH UK manager Michael Richardson and local programme assistant Dennis Kerspuy, from Coaching for Hope’s Cape Town office. Dennis will be working closely with the young people over the coming months to help them put their training into practice and to get feedback about where they would like this programme to go. “Working with the young leaders was a great experience, which I felt happy to be part of. They all have with massive potential and I can really see them stepping up to become fantastic role models for other youths in their communities” (Dennis Kerspuy, Coaching for Hope South Africa Programme Assistant).
Coaching for Hope in Mali
In consultation with local HIV authorities and international partners, CFH Mali has started the first step in improving its Monitoring and Evaluation strategy with a new young persons and coach HIV survey. The questions of the survey have been rewritten to help demonstrate how CFH is meeting its goals, show attitude and behaviour change, and to facilitate better understanding of the questions. Future plans for improving monitoring and evaluation include translation of documents into Bambara, establishment of a user friendly database, and more focus group
discussions.
Partnership with the Malian Football Federation has been fruitful; six local CFH coaches, including the CFH Programme Assistant were invited to participate in a two-week upper level training course focusing on new training tactics for junior and cadet teams. Coaches’ involvement with CFH enabled them to advance professionally, and this training course demonstrated how compatible the Football Federation and CFH can be in meeting the various needs of a developing Malian football structure.
CFH coordinator, Sheylan Yearsley, was invited by partners, Right to Play and the FEMASH (National Federation of Sport for persons with disabilities) to participate in a three-day training course on integrating disabled people into sports activities. The course covered many aspects of working with disabled people, and breakout groups to identify solutions to integration of people with varying disabilities. To better facilitate communication with headquarters and external partners, Mme Bana Sidibe, the Financial and Administration officer has begun English Language courses. She is making great progress.
CFH stepped into the role of advisor and supporter to Nouhoum Keita, a level two coach who is deaf, and committed to tearing down barriers that exist between the deaf community and the hearing. Nouhoum, who is the president of a sports association for people with hearing disabilities developed, found funding for, and managed the first ever National Deaf Persons Football Championship in Mali in December 2008. Apart from offering financial support to meet the medical and nutrition needs of participating players, CFH Mali staff spent time working through the budget to bring down costs, offering recommendations for the smooth implementation of the project. The Championship brought together teams from six different regions of Mali including Bamako.
To celebrate the International Day of the Rights of the Child, (November 20th) CFH invited a team of young football players from the Same Community for an afternoon football event. This event put youth on the same playing field as the coaches with football matches between CFH coaches and the young people, a question answer session about HIV and AIDS as well as an explanation of the history and importance of the day. Three outstanding CFH coaches were rewarded for their continued work and innovation with the project
and the team from Same, which has been actively promoting CFH in their community for several months received a full set of football jerseys donated by Ashland High School.
Coaching for Hope teamed up with local partner Jigi in December to celebrate World AIDS Day. A football match, integrated football sessions, animations by CFH coaches and interventions from community members helped raise awareness about HIV and AIDS in general, and HIV testing in particular. Five CFH coaches participated in the event.
Coaching for Hope in Burkina Faso
By the end of the December 2008 CFH Burkina Faso had facilitated 80 series of sexual health awareness workshops in Ouagadougou. These were delivered by coaches trained by CFH and involved over 1,600 children. Each coach delivering the workshops was visited by an experienced CFH coach to supervise, support and provide feedback. 63 series of workshops have also been delivered in rural areas of Burkina Faso by CFH partner Réseau Africain Jeunesse Santé et Développement au Burkina Faso since July 2008. This means that in 2008 we reached approximately 3,000 vulnerable young footballers in Burkina Faso with our sexual health workshops.
In November 2008, CFH coaches received training on a rights based approach to disability. This meeting enabled our coaches to better understand the rights and the difficulties of integration and acceptance faced by disabled people, as well as the social model of disability. After the training, which was carried out by CFH partner Handicap Solidare Burkina, some coaches gave us their views. Saoura Pauline, Senior CFH coach, said: "I am really satisfied with this training. This enabled me to identify the problems, but to understand that there are many prejudices around people with disabilities that should be removed from people's minds. They have the same rights as all other citizens. I would like to follow other courses of this kind".
At the end of January 2009, BCS Consulting delivered two excellent advanced sexual health workshops to19 experienced CFH coaches. All the coaches attending these workshops had previously been trained by CFH to deliver eight workshops on sexual health to their football teams, and all the coaches had delivered these workshops many times. The advanced workshops covered sexual health and focused on sexually transmitted infections, new developments in the field of HIV and AIDS and how to effectively communicate issues about sexual health to young people. This course was in response to a demand from our coaches for more specialist training on sexual health. The hunger shown by these coaches to expand and improve their knowledge of sexual health, so that they might help their communities to stay strong and healthy, is very encouraging.
CFH coach Alassane Bob Damiba's team, Sourou FC, recently won the second Division football league, which gave them a ticket into the elite of national football in Burkina, the First Division. Lets hope his team can emulate CFH partner Hull City FC and excel at the highest level. They are off to a good start after winning their first game 2-1 against the 2006-7 1st division winning team CFO. Sourou FC currently sit in 6th place in the First Division and everyone at CFH in Burkina and abroad wishes them ‘Bonne Chance’. Bob he told us: "I am very happy with my performance, but I think I owe a lot to all the training that I have followed with CFH. My training sessions are based on CFH football workshops. I say thank you to CFH and say thank you to all the other coaches of CFH. Words fail me. I ask CFH to maximise the training of players because today I have evolved as a coach, but it could also be a great player that emerges the next time. At the moment I am far from Ouagadougou, but I am eager to return to say hello to the whole CFH team.
Coaching for Hope in the UK
We are rolling out our curriculum with young people between the ages of 16-19 that are currently on the NEETS programme at Hull City. NEETS represents people Not in Employment Education or Training and supports those people in aspiring to
re-engage with finding work, primarily through self-esteem building, and core skills development, of which CFH can play a massive part. The CFH course is delivered over a ten week period one day a week concentrating on the core curriculum of learning the basics of football coaching and communication, moving onto the substance abuse crossover sessions which have been used so effectively in South Africa.
On the same lines as the NEETS project, RE-ENGAGE targets young people between the ages of 13-16 who are not in school or follow traditional forms of education. CFH trains and educates these young people on the communication styles of different sports coaches and asks how and why some people are effective teachers/coaches and why some are not. The social messages we deliver are communication styles and how to speak to people about issues such as drugs and alcohol.
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