The 2013 Kenyan Elections: The role of football in sustaining peace

– Sam Dilliway –

I’m very sad to hear the news about the violence in Tana River, just up the coast from where we are, near to Somalia. Over the past two weeks we have seen it explained as being conflict over land between pastoralists, but with the death toll now topping one hundred, the arrest of prominent MP and Assistant Livestock Minister Dhadha Godhana, and comment being made from the US, there is another story emerging; this violence has tribalism at its roots, and is being perpetrated with the 2013 presidential elections in mind. 

Dhado Godhana, Kenyan MP, arrested yesterday in connection with the violence in Tana River

As we have travelled across Kenya the past two months, we have frequently discussed the 2007/8 post-election violence, and found there to be widespread belief that the root causes of that violence have not been eradicated, and fear that the next elections, which were due to be in the autumn in 2012 but have been postponed to March 2013, will also see a considerable amount of conflict along tribal lines between people who ordinarily live alongside each other in peace.

It’s in this context that I wonder about the capability of sports to be used as a tool for peace: Can Sports be used for Peacebuilding? It’s a question that I’ve been asking throughout my research this summer, but here I see a concrete situation in the not too distant future looming. In Kenya we have met with organisations that have experience ranging from twenty-five years, all the way down to just two years. Each of these organisations felt helpless to intervene the last time around, and indeed often had their programmes interrupted because of security concerns. There were some interesting small-scale interventions, such as tournaments arranged post-conflict to bring people together, and a trauma recovery program that was initiated and run on an ad-hoc basis on several occasions, but it seems there were not any SDP programs in operation at that time that were planned and co-ordinated with any experience or training in peace work or peacebuilding.

I wonder if the GIZ YDF program on violence prevention might be able to do anything about this? It’s new, having only been finished late last year, and we know of four organisations in the country who have facilitators trained in South Africa to train coaches in the Violence Prevention through Football program. From our research we learned these programs are now just starting out in Nairobi, while one program on the coast started implementing it over the past few months.

YDF Manual for Violence Prevention, Created by GIZ

Can a football program play any serious role among the many needed for violence prevention? Can it become a necessary element alongside a wider set of interventions such as mediation and negotiation? The important difference here is that SDP programs attract young people who enjoy sports, and predominantly operate at the grassroots level.

Common Kenyan opinion is that during election periods violence is directly instigated by wealthy politicians motivated to increase their chances at gaining a political seat and thereby gaining access to the nation’s riches. Their strategy is to incite tribal divisions by paying poorly educated, unemployed young people to attack citizens from other tribes. But who are these poorly educated renegades? Are such young people included in football projects run by organisations such as MYSA, VAP, TIA Hope and Moving the Goalposts? Can these football projects have such a strong impact as to change perceptions and create relationships between participants across all economic and tribal lines that are strong enough to discourage repeating the 2007/8 violence come the 2013-election? Specific research on this is interesting, necessary and timely.

Two football teams line up for the final at the East African Cup. The tournament has a strong peace and togetherness ethic.

My mind stirs as I write this because we were recently told by an organization that the GIZ funding for the YDF violence prevention program was due to come to an end shortly, and they were unaware if it would continue, thus the program at the height of its demand faces imminent discontinuation. It seems to me this is the critical time to increase funding given the current need for peacebuilding projects before the election. And, since these programs are newly established, finding supplemental funding overnight would be a real challenge.

Girls on the bottom- How do we break the cycle?

– Sarah Oxford –

I’ve observed girls sports programs throughout East Africa for a couple months now. And although evidence is mostly anecdotal, I wholeheartedly believe that these programs make a big difference in girl’s lives.

Research concerning girls and the impact of sports hasn’t been conducted to the extent needed. What has been done is research in Western nations that can be used as insight to the importance and benefit in the lives of adolescent girls there, and thus as a motivator for more research to be done in places with budding youth sport programs like East Africa.

In 1997 The Presidents Council on Physical Fitness and Sports researched and documented a positive correlation between girls and regular participation in sports. The report stated that these girls “tended to do better academically and have lower school drop-out rates” and “showed reduced symptoms of stress and depression…”A follow-up report revealed that female athletes in the United States “tend to become sexually active later in life, have fewer sexual partners, and, when sexually active, make greater use of contraception than their non-athletic counterparts.” (MYSA, Letting Girls Play, 2002).

Let’s not assume that there is a direct correlation between athletes across the globe, as people face various challenges in studies of this nature, but let’s also not ignore what sports can give a child.

A typical child raised in a slum is born into a world of disadvantages. Her health, sanitation, and nutrition will not be of standard. She will be less likely to attend school and more likely to be introduced to violence and sexual promiscuity. It’s the brutal cycle of poverty.

Mathare Slum, Nairobi, Kenya

However, give her an organized sports team and many of those ailments can be alleviated. She can face challenge without dire consequence (decision making on the pitch), she can form a family away from home, and she will partake in exercise that benefits her health. Now couple her team’s practices with an educational curriculum that uses an interactive educational methodology to teach about Aids prevention, puberty, sexual relations and conflict resolution. On top of that she is given a free number to call for any reason (most often domestic or gender based violence) and told she has free access to lawyers. Being a part of a program of this nature definitely beats idleness or remaining in an unsafe environment all day. The cost to her is nothing, the gain, everything.

MYSA U-13 Football Champions

I’m not saying this team won’t make up for child-abuse, because nothing can replace a loving and providing parent. No it doesn’t make up for rape and it won’t give her dinner money that she can find by partaking in forced prostitution.

But it will give her the opportunity to see that there is more to life than the world she knew before joining the team and more importantly it will provide her with the skills needed to move away from—or improve—her world.

The Search for Balls.

– Sarah Oxford –

I’m always excited to see new inventions geared towards relieving LMIC’s (Low – Middle Income Country) challenges. Recently I was handed a ball that I believe can change the game of football on the continent of Africa and beyond. With one bounce, this magical ball erased images of kids kicking home-made soccer balls on dirt pitches. Made of the same material as Croc shoes, this soccer ball is virtually indestructible. It’s potential for play seems endless.

One World Futbol

I held this ball at the beginning of my trip and envisioned that the SPD programs I would soon visit would all use these magical yellow balls. Three countries later, I sadly report I’ve still only held one of these balls. Moreover, I’ve been told that acquiring these balls seems more cumbersome than beneficial.

What happened? Once the rockstar investor got his ‘helping the needy’ attention in the press, did he turn his attention elsewhere? Once again in our divided world, we have the capability, but somehow not the ability to make the difference.

If you have spotted any of these balls, please let me know…or let’s reproduce some on our own terms!

Gulu

We’ve made it to Uganda and are currently in Gulu, having spent a couple of days in Kampala. We came up here to attend the end of season awards day for a project run by The Kids League (TKL) and Gulu Disabled Person’s Union (GDPU). This is a three-year project that receives funding from Comic Relief, the Premier League (we think the English one) and Motivation, to increase participation in sport of those with physical disabilities. Conflict in this area ceased in 2007, and it seems many were still in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps until 2009, where they contracted diseases such as polio that have left them with various disabilities including the inability to walk, hear and see. We were told that this has been treated as a cause of shame for many families, who therefore keep such children inside the house, restricting them from education, developing friendships and participating in sports. This project aims to change this by creating many opportunities for participation in sport, thereby improving health, creating friendships, teaching life skills and giving confidence that these children do indeed have the ability to play a full part in their community. The project also has a strong one-on-one mentoring system in place to discover and meet the individual needs of participants.

The Kids League has also sent teams abroad, achieving spectacular successes. They have won twenty of the twenty-three tournaments entered across Europe, including the most prestigious cup in world youth football! Players from this team have gone on to represent Uganda and one has just been transferred to a French top division team. We also saw a new type of football design that we were told has the potential to revolutionise football in Africa: It’s an indestructible football, developed by the musician Sting’s manager (who knew?). We got to feel and bounce it, and were told that the program manager tested it by driving his car forward and backwards over it and it didn’t break!

We’ve heard and read a little about the impact of the Kony 2012 video here. There was anger at the military solution suggested by Invisible Children because at the time of the violence, many people were forced to live in IDP camps, and having now been allowed to return to their villages and homes, the people do not want another militarisation of this area, forcing them to return to the camps. The area is now safe, and has been for the last five years, and Joseph Kony and the LRA are now thought to be in the Congo, a distance approximate to how far the UK is from Slovakia!

Building friendships

I recently read a very interesting MA dissertation by Jonathan Lea-Howarth of Brighton University. The author based his argument around the theories of Galtung & Lederach that the development of relationships can be of significant value for peace, which he added to suggesting that sport can be a tool for creating these relationships. I find this argument compelling. The EAC organisers believe that building friendships between kids is one of the strengths of their current format, where young people and their leaders from Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda have the opportunity to meet, play and get to know one another, which in turn helps to negate stereotypes or a sense of otherisation that is often created at times of conflict. I wonder how this development of relationships can be measured and monitored? Perhaps it could be done through surveys to group leaders/coaches, and the participants themselves? Second, I wonder if and how these relationships are continued? A number of teams return to Moshi for the cup every year, so I imagine that helps significantly, but would there be contact away from the cup?