- Social Protection
- Early childhood Development
- Empowering People and Communities through Sports
Abstract
Adolescent girls in Namibia face several inter-related challenges. These include high HIV and AIDS prevalence rates; high levels of teenage pregnancies; high levels of gender based violence as well as drug and alcohol abuse.
Sports for Development (S4D) is one of the interventions that offers a unique opportunity to engage adolescents and young people in addressing risky behaviours. It is against this backdrop that the Namibia Football Association’s (NFA) Galz and Goals S4D programme was established to address the issue of vulnerability among adolescent girls and provide life skills education to empower and equip them with life skills for making healthy lifestyle choices.
The Galz and Goals S4D programme is the first national S4D programme of its kind, aimed at increasing the empowerment of adolescent girls aged 10 to 18 years through participation in football leagues and the promotion of healthy lifestyles under the motto “Young Girls Changing Lives”.
The Gals and Goals S4D programme uses Sport2Life Tool to foster the development of skills necessary for young people to make healthy lifestyle choices. Sport2Life integrates the healthy life style components into sports context helping players to develop the skills to make consistent, long term choices. The Galz and Goals coaches are therefore trained in Sport2Life enabling them to foster high impact attributes including self-awareness, positive self and group identity, situational awareness, alternative thinking, future focus, discipline, social confidence and pro-social connections in all players participating in the S4D programme. To date, the programme is implemented in 10 communities from 8 regions reaching more than 3,000 adolescent girls with healthy lifestyle messages and seven of the S4D programme graduates are now participating in the national women’s football team.
Description
The intended results for the Galz and Goals programme are to develop adolescent girls by making football and information on issues affecting young girls across the country more accessible, through providing girls with skills and experience to make informed life choices both on and off the field of play and developing strong, healthy, self-confident young women who are skilled football players and active community citizens through participation in football and life skills activities.
The purpose of this impact evaluation was to assess how the implementation of the Gals and Goals S4D programme has led to positive outcomes for the participating adolescent girls and their families, and the role of the Sport2Life tool in fostering the development of life skills. The evaluation intends to focus on programmatic results and short term impacts generated by the S4D programme.
The specific objectives of the evaluation were to;