Coaching for Hope and the City of Cape Town: Empowerment of Women and Girls Through Football

Interview with Bukiwe, coach and peer-educator for Bread of Life

Bread of Life is a registered NPO in South Africa is based in township Langa just outside of Cape Town. Bread of Life, a faith-based organisation, specialises in education, peer-education, sport and life-skills and is one of Coaching for Hope’s implementing partners in the Empowerment of Women and Girls Through Football project. Coaching for Hope trained up 8 female coaches from Langa earlier this year and the numbers keep growing. Bukiwe is a Bread of Life peer-educator and newly trained coach. She discusses her experiences of being part of the project.

Tottenham Hotspur Foundation coaches Karen and Olivia at a training session in Langa

BUKIWE:

I’m a facilitator for Bread of Life and deliver life skills sessions within schools in Langa and I also identify students who show leadership skills and train them up as peer educators. The topics that we cover include relationships, stigma, peer pressure, teenage pregnancy and HIV/AIDS. Before I became a facilitator I was a peer educator at my primary school and then at high school. You start out as a Junior, then progress to being a Senior and then the last stage is being a Mentor. It’s all about passing on information- once you learn you must give to others. When you become a mentor, not only do you work within schools, you also conduct door-to-door visits in the communities. Let me make an example, you go to one house and you see there’s a mother living with HIV/AIDS and you see they are struggling. You write down relevant information such as how many people are staying in the house, how many kids there are, how

Coaching for Hope and the City of Cape Town: Empowerment of Women and Girls Through Football

the kids are being supported while the parents are sick and do they get drugs. Then you go to the social services to explain the situation to them and ask them to conduct a follow-up home visit with you.

I decided to start coaching this year as most of the teams here in Langa only have male coaches and there are no female teams playing in the SASOL or SAFA leagues, there’s only guys that have the league, so we are trying to push that. We have 60 players in our club and we train on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 3pm until 6pm. We have 8 coaches and each coach has a minimum of 15 players. Our aim is to form a local girls’ league.

Coach Coordinator Cynthia leading a warm-up

The key focus areas that we are looking at in our girls are the physical, emotional, spiritual, mental and social. We’re doing soccer skills- controlling, heading, shooting, but when we do soccer trainings we don’t just look at how they’re doing at soccer, we sit down and talk to them about life skills: Ubuntu, self-esteem, team work, communication, sense of humour, self-awareness, creativities, goal-setting, focus- concentrating on what you’re doing, responsibility, and self-confidence- when you go in the field you must say, “I can do it”. We have tools to measure the success of the project, for example with attendance registers, we write down the names of all the players at each practice. We then see who’s not there, if a girl wasn’t at the field on Wednesday, then on Friday we look at her to see if there’s something wrong, maybe there was a reason why she didn’t come to the training the other day, so we see whether we need to talk to them- maybe she can’t talk to anyone at home.

Coaching for Hope and the City of Cape Town: Empowerment of Women and Girls Through Football

As a coach I am a role model and I must set an example. When the girls see me, I want them to say, ‘look at coach I want to be like her, she’s very beautiful, she’s not drinking, not doing alcohol’. They can see that I’m a woman, I’m doing the job that a man usually does. But because I’m dealing with girls I’m dealing with other issues, if there was a man who was coaching them they wouldn’t be open to say anything, but with me they are free and open. I always say to the girls that if any of them has a problem and want to talk about it, they must come and talk to me after the training session. Some of the girls are staying just with their father and they don’t feel like they can talk about puberty-related issues.

Coach Lizzie with her group of girls

For further information on the project, please email Coaching for Hope’s coordinator Lucy Mills at Lucy.Mills@coachingforhope.org