Skillz Street returns to PE.

Today saw the return of the Skillz Street intervention to Port Elizabeth! After a successfully training 20 coaches in April, we were ready to execute another fun filled set of sessions with girls aged between 10 and 14 from New Brighton township in Port Elizabeth. This all intervention promotes recreational activity among females, as they do not typically get the same opportunities in sport as their male counterparts; it also has a life skills and HIV prevention component because HIV is disproportionally concentrated among girls and women.


We were a bit apprehensive about the number of girls that would attend having sent out 178 invites in the form of consent forms that would go to parents who would then decide whether they would let their kids participate in our program. 100 girls showed up and the excitement in their chatter and participation throughout certainly lifted my spirit after a lot of hard work preparing and making sure this intervention would be memorable and impactful for the young ladies in attendance. All the signs point to this.

Our coaches stepped up to the plate and their enthusiasm rubbed off on the kids - I have a feeling more than 100 girls will show up on Thursday. Below are a few snapshots of Skillz Street Port Elizabeth - this is what we do, and moments like these make it all worth it:

Molefe Primary school will be our host.

Coaches welcome the ladies to Skillz Street.

One of the groups with their coach (10 girls per coach)

Girls from different schools get to know each other through a game of Bingo.

Coaches form bonds with their teams through team time which happens at the beginning and end of the session.

More on Skillz Street to come! Be sure to vote for GRS in the Chase Community Giving Challenge, here.

Final countdown

On the week of June 17th I will be calling time on my 10 month internship with Grassroot Soccer. We're currently planning the next phase of Skillz Street following our Training of Coaches. Most of my time will be spent making sure we are able to deliver the new curriculum effectively. Lots of work, lots of planning, meetings and fun for the kids! Updates to come.

Play like a girl: Skillz Street.

Following successful pilots of the curriculum in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, Skillz Street has officially been added as a supplementary curriculum as part of Grassroot Soccer’s Life Skillz and HIV prevention work in South Africa. With funding partly from the Elton John foundation GRS has trained coaches in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth in this innovative curriculum that is designed to cater to young girls who in South Africa are more likely to contract HIV than their male counterparts. 

As mentioned in a prior blog Skillz Street is is a girls targeted intervention forming part of Grassroot Soccer’s life skills and HIV prevention programs. The intervention has been developed in response to overwhelming research that shows:

1.      Participation in sport among adolescent females correlates to a range of health benefits, and;

2.      HIV is disproportionately concentrated among women and girls.

Skillz Street combines Fair Play soccer with HIV Counseling and Testing (HCT), assertiveness-, efficacy-, and interpersonal relationship-building activities including a peer led community outreach day. 

In the pilot version of the curriculum run in November we did not implement the HCT element but this was tried out successfully in Cape Town and we will be following suite here in Port Elizabeth.  Testing is voluntary and for many of the girls, this will be their first time testing for HIV. The goal is to allow them to know their status and build good habits. Many young people have their first sexual experience early, therefore being aware of the dangers that come with unprotected sex and multiple sexual partners will hopefully deter them from irresponsible sex. The community outreach component of the program allows girls to be aware of opportunities and services available in their communities. Fairplay soccer places an emphasis on teamwork, respecting opponents and communication between players and a mediator.  

On Wednesday April 13^th a Training of Coches (ToC) for Skillz Street began. We decided to train all our female coaches to start things off, with the view of training more coaches in future. The training lasted 3 days and one of our Trainers from Cape Town, “Hooter” led the group in discussion and activities from the Skillz Street curriculum. It was a fantastic time and on the final day coaches were confident enough to deliver parts of the curriculum to each other in preparation of actually doing the program with kids in their communities. 

I was happy to be part of the planning and implementation of the training and having already planned and coordinated the last Skillz Street I am sure that we can use lessons from the pilot and this training to ensure that the program fulfills its goal of engaging young girls in a meaningful way. Skillz Street targets girls aged between 12 and 18.

Our coaches were very responsive and their position as role models in their communities is undoubted. The next 3 weeks will involve some heavy planning to ensure that Skillz Street reaches girls in the three communities we serve. I am energized by the challenge and hopeful that our program will prove to be a catalyst to positive change. 

Coaches participating in a Skillz Street discussion.

During the training we watched some high impact videos illustrating the power and potential of young girls when given opportunities. Our organization plays a part in the lives of a generation of girls that we hope will live a happy healthy life HIV free.

First video - The Girl Effect (see girleffect.org) :

Second video 1 goal, 2 girls: 

Approximately 600 girls will go through the Skillz Street program in Port Elizabeth this calendar year. I was inspired by the energy and verve of our coaches during the training and I am confident that they will take this to the field with the young girls we will be working with!   

Skillz Street in pictures

On December 6th we had our last Skillz Street. I plan on putting out a detailed blog highlighting what each practice was about and my impressions of it later this weekend. But for now here are some pictures from the Red location museum where we had the intervention:

An aerial view of the Red location museum .

Coach Amy leads an energizer with some of the kids:

Coaches, G and Zoe explain the Skillz contract to their group of girls:

The opening circle (we had one at the beginning of each section).

The museum in the background:

The Red Location community surrounds the museum:

Intoducing: Skillz Street

As mentioned in the Girls Count article earlier, there is an increasing focus on girls in social profit ventures, and Grassroot Soccer is no different. In a society where females have been marginalized and often abused, the need to empower and support young women is imperative.

In our case, this has been manifested in the Skillz Street curriculum which is a new addition to the group of Grassroot Soccer curricula.Skillz Street will include all the lessons from the Generation Skillz curriculum which targets South Africans 15-19 years of age specifically addressing the social norms that fuel this epidemic. In the case of girls aged below 15, the Skillz Core curriculum will be taught. Engaging and empowering young South African women is seen as central to the success of,campaigns to reduce HIV infections in the country.

Unfortunately in many African nations including South Africa, girls have been seen as second-class citizens and not given opportunities to reach their full potential. Sports programs directly challenge such misperceptions about women’s capabilities. Street Skillz aims to empower, inspire and educate young girls, while they enjoy recreational activity through the soccer, participate in community outreach work and learn from the unique Skillz curricula administered by Grassroot Soccer coaches. The idea is to use non-competitive sport to build an atmosphere of collaboration among the girls through fairplay soccer while they learn valuable life lessons.

In a 2008 report, the International Working Group for Sport for Development and Peace stated: “Research on sport, gender and development indicates that sport can benefit girls and women by: enhancing health and well-being; fostering self-esteem and empowerment; facilitating social inclusion and integration; challenging gender norms; and providing opportunities for leadership and achievement.” Access to safe, public space for young women to play soccer is limited, further solidifying gender norms around participation in sport in South Africa and most parts of the African continent. To illustrate this point one can look at the South African Football Association—the 6th largest football association on the planet— which has fewer than 1% registered female players.

An additional aspect of Skillz Street will be integrated testing, with the girls getting the chance to know their status having gone through either the Skillz curriculum, or Generation Skillz.

In its 2009-2011 Outcome Framework, UNAIDS identified “stopping violence against women and girls” and “empowering young people to protect themselves from HIV” as two of its eight key priority areas. To achieve these goals the GRS team that devised Skillz Street feels that "young women in South Africa need increased knowledge about the dangers of multiple concurrent partnerships and older partners, self-efficacy to avoid cross-generational and transactional sex, perception of opportunity, skills to negotiate safer sexual relationships, and support to stay strong when faced with challenges." Skillz Street will hopefully play a role in this educational push, especially among young women of South Africa.

Over the next few weeks our team will be looking to launch Skillz Street in Port Elizabeth. The challenge is getting it done during the holiday period when most kids will be leaving home to travel for the holidays.Most of our regular interventions are tied with the school year, whether it be doing programs during or after school, with teacher supervision. Our first attempt at delivering the Skillz street curriculum will most likely overlap with the school holidays, it will be a challenge but there should be a way to make it work. Once January things will be more clear cut and we can look forward to working with girls in different townships around PE.