Mathare Youth Sports Association: Giving Youth a Sporting Chance

Posted on 26 April 2010

By Mariana Andrade

The Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) was founded in 1987. It now involves over 20,000 youth in programs that link sport to a range of community activities designed to help overcome the hardships of the Mathare slums in Nairobi, where over half a million people live without water, electricity and sanitation.  This article is based on a phone conversation with MYSA founder Bob Munro.

Joe Achola, at 25, is one the youngest elected politicians in Kenya.  Dennis Oliech is one of the stars playing in Ligue 1, France’s top professional soccer league.  Charity Muthoni, who celebrated her 12th birthday in January, is chair-elect of one of MYSA’s executive committees and has a constituency of 2000 youths. These three outstanding young people are representative of MYSA’s motto: “Giving youth a sporting chance”. Their stories, and those of many other MYSA alumni, are living examples of how sport can be used to transform lives. 

Creating tomorrow’s leaders – One of the greatest achievements of the MYSA model is that the organization is owned and managed by the youth themselves. According to Bob Munro, we all respond to challenges, therefore you need to give kids a chance to test themselves and their leadership. And they have done just that. MYSA’s youth leadership, whose average age is 15, makes all the decisions regarding the organization, including defining how money is spent. These young leaders learn valuable leadership, organizational and budgeting skills that can then be applied in their adult careers.

Reducing disease – MYSA was one of the organizations that pioneered the link between sport and the environment. One of the biggest problems in the Mathare slums is disease caused by garbage, waste buildup and contaminated water. A highly creative feature of MYSA is that the organization ties environmental cleanups directly to the competition of its 100 soccer leagues. The 1600 boys and girls teams are periodically mobilized to conduct cleanups in their communities. For every successful project completion, the teams receive 6 points in the league standings.  League statistics include not only the games won, lost and drawn but also garbage clean-up.

Creating heroes on the field and helping jailed kids - In 1994, the Mathare United Football Club, a professional offshoot of MYSA, was created to inspire youth and showcase Mathare talent. The club is formed entirely of players, coaches and referees who are alumni of MYSA and other Mathare community development programs. In only 5 seasons, the club rose to the top professional league in Kenya, the Premier league, and is today a great source of pride in the Mathare slums and beyond.

As part of their duties, all players and staff must perform community service. On days when there are no league games, you can find them visiting juvenile detention centers where children as young as 4 are held. For the children, spending time with a hero you see only on TV and that has grown up in a slum is a great source of encouragement. MYSA, through its Jail Kid program, also works on feeding detained children and reuniting them with their families, helping the children return and stay in school and seeking to link families with microfinance programs to aid them in starting small-scale businesses.

Empowering girls – The MYSA girls soccer program got off to a rocky start in the early 1990s because very few players would show up for the games. Organizers discovered that this was not due to lack of enthusiasm but because girls were expected to stay home and look after their younger siblings while their single mothers were at work. This was resolved by setting up daycare tents next to the playing fields, where girls could leave their siblings while they played. There was also the perception that girls were not good at playing soccer. This quickly changed when two top female players from Norway, a long-time supporter of MYSA, held training clinics in which they were pitted against the best goalkeeper in Mathare. After they scored again and again against the male goalkeeper, the girls were convinced that, they too, could play soccer.   

Bob Munro recalls the profound changes that the girls program brought to the community. The girls went from being timid to having a newfound confidence and empowerment that acted as the best anti-teenage pregnancy program they could have hoped for. The transformation in the soccer fields has been replicated in the organization’s leadership where girls and boys participate equally.

MYSA also conducts numerous other projects such as training youth leaders in HIV and AIDS prevention and counseling, providing over 450 awards and scholarships through the MYSA Leadership Awards project, as well as using sport for peace and reconciliation in refugee camps and to integrate the disabled. 

By using sports as the linking element, MYSA has shown how it is possible to create heroes on the field while at the same time creating leaders and role models off the field.

Mariana Andrade is a Mid-Career Master in Public Administration candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a big proponent of sport as a transformational agent for social and economic development.