Safer Communities through Soccer: How Khayelitsha's First Girls Soccer Team is Changing the Game in South Africa
Women and girls in Khayelitsha, South Africa experience gender inequality, specifically the threat of sexual violence, every day. These threats limit their freedom as equal citizens to enjoy the urban environment and to exercise their rights to education, work, recreation, collective organization and participation in political life. In order to empower girls to reclaim those public spaces, Grassroot Soccer (GRS) will leverage its presence in the Khayelitsha soccer community and its experience with gender-focused programs to scale-up organized soccer leagues for girls.
Grassroot Soccer is uniquely positioned to lead this effort. In 2011, GRS staff formed the first girls soccer team in Khayelitsha. The team, called RV United, engaged and recruited female soccer players aged 15 to 23 using two GRS sources: participants involved in GRS’s girls-only soccer-based HIV education program, and GRS’s local female HIV prevention peer educators. This combination created a unique mixture of female players and role-models. Initially, players were hesitant to play publicly as boys ridiculed and teased them as they played. However, after 6 months of public trainings and participation in tournaments, the attitudes of boys and girls in Khayelitsha began to visibly shift. Boys became true fans and supporters of the team, traveling to games and tracking players’ statistics.
Soon after the formation of the team, the influence of RV United and its players on the broader community—and younger girls in particular—grew. A group of girls aged 8-13 approached RV United and lobbied to form a team for younger players. Additionally, adolescent girls from neighboring areas started contacting RV United coaches, pleading for transport money so that they could travel 45-minutes every day to play. RV United began as a group of 15 girls developing their basic soccer skills; within a year, it expanded to three full-sized teams with two age divisions. The rapid growth of RV United emerged in response to a desire of girls in the community to belong to a team and play soccer. One player said that on RV United, “We help each other, we don’t judge each other. We’re just a big family.” By promoting girls’ access to public spaces, RV United started a movement. RV United girls soccer club was challenging gender norms and expectations in Khayelitsha, and the girls were speaking up for their right to access public spaces and have a public voice in a language everyone could understand: soccer.
Building on the work of RV United, GRS will develop an evidence-based leadership, coaching, and citizenship programme for RV United players and coaches. The programme will enable RV United to recruit girls into structured soccer leagues by developing communication materials and strengthening their communication skills. GRS will also formalize RV United as a Soccer Club for high performing girls. The RV United Soccer Club will serve as a community structure through which women and girls advocate for gender equality and form a constituency that gains access to public sporting facilities for girls’ soccer leagues. Leagues follow a normal soccer format but include additional life skills and awareness raising activities, with a focus on social cohesion among women and girls. Through stakeholder engagement and public soccer leagues and events, RV United will create demand for girls’ soccer in different communities, and organize leagues in public spaces in those communities in response. The leagues will challenge gender norms and expectations as well as ensure these public spaces are safe environments for women and girls. The Football for Hope Center in Khayelitsha, run by Grassroot Soccer, will serve as a public meeting point for players and teams.
As a significant number of girls begin to participate in sports and as female athletes gain public recognition, girls acquire new mentors and community affiliations, and will begin to more openly and comfortably participate in community spaces. Girls’ participation can begin to change community norms about their roles and capacities. In this way, sports can be the catalyst for the transformation of social norms.
By continuously claiming public urban spaces, RV United girls became more confident soccer players, and the surrounding community became more normalized and supportive to the concept of a girls soccer club. Due to community-driven growth of RV United and feedback from players, we believe this idea can be scaled up to other sub-communities in Khayelitsha and the surrounding townships. We want to develop an evidence-based programme and model that empowers women and girls to come together around soccer, advocates for access to public spaces, works with community stakeholders to promote gender equality, and promotes violence-free communities.
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