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In patriarchal communities, chances for women to play sport are rare. Hannah Duncan talks to Sarah Van Vooren about a project opening up avenues.
Opportunities for girls to play soccer in Nepal are few and far between, with attitudes around participation not as far advanced as in other parts of the world.
One organisation trying to change this, on both fronts, is Atoot. Founded by Sarah van Vooren, its aim is to use soccer, education, life-skills workshops and positive mentorship to educate and empower girls in the country nestled beneath the Himalayas.
Hannah Duncan spoke to Sarah to find out more.
SVV: In 2018, I was working in rural Kenya and, having spent the previous six years working worldwide for the vision of others, I realised I was ready to do something on my own.
I knew I wanted to start an organisation in a country where girls and women are marginalised.
I kept thinking about my old colleague, Mashreeb, who is from Nepal. He always wanted to start something in his country.
I called him in the middle of the night and laid out my idea of co-founding a Sport for Development (S4D), Football for Good (F4G) non-profit, which would use soccer and education as a catalyst for female empowerment and holistic, long-term development. He enthusiastically said yes; and, thus, Atoot was born.
SVV: Atoot runs a multi-faceted and interconnected four-prong programme, which provides daily soccer sessions, extra educational classes, life-skills workshops and community engagement.
Each programme aspect is interlinked and creates safe spaces which enable girls to develop a feminist community that smashes barriers and challenges societal norms.
These programmes are facilitated in order to empower our girls to discover greater knowledge and sense of entitlement to their rights by building their individual and team capacity.
SVV: Atoot works with marginalised Nepali girls. While boys are also welcome to participate, they are required to bring along three new girls and actively encourage and advocate for their regular attendance.
Our sporting and educational programming is top notch within Nepal, which makes it appealing to the local boys.
But this stipulation [to support girls to attend] challenges the deeply rooted privileges enjoyed by males in the local communities and helps them to understand how hard a girl must fight for one ’common’ opportunity.
We operate within a few small villages located in rural south Nepal, along the Nepali-Indian border. The girls and their communities belong to some of the most historically marginalised castes, ethnicities and minority communities in Nepal.
From our first scouting trip, we integrated ourselves into the community holistically, listening intently to the community stakeholders and stating we only wished to work in the communities if we are welcomed.
Through these meetings, we built trust, the community said they would welcome our work and not stop girls from joining.
Maybe that is because they thought we would uproot our work in the near future. Most development aid agencies who visit these communities stay for a day or two, take some photos of their ’help’ and leave, never to return again.
SVV: Since we started in the field programme in 2019, we have worked with a total of 329 girls and roughly 350-plus women within the communities.
From the start, we placed a strong emphasis on interweaving ourselves into the fabric of the local communities, building trust, which in exchange has garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback.
The girls and community stakeholders always want Atoot as part of their lives and communities. They cannot believe we continue to come every day, even though we have told them again and again that we are building a long-term, sustainable foundation.
SVV: The work Atoot does is unfathomable to think about in Nepal, especially as it is solely for girls - and their male allies - in the most rural of areas.
Girls who had never been given anything before are now being offered safe spaces with top sporting and educational opportunities, every single day.
The platforms we provide are continuously building the girls’ personal, mental, physical, behavioural, educational and emotional capacities daily, which is preparing them for their future chapters in life.
They are learning many different soft skills, which helps them fight against the multitude of injustices they face.
Our work nurtures, builds, enhances and cultivates a strong feminist movement which benefits communal development. Building our girls’ capacities will ensure the results achieved will be sustained over time, as they will be leading this change for years to come.
Every single day, Atoot girls are smashing stereotypes, breaking down long-standing norms and advocating for themselves, one kick on the pitch, classroom attendance and life-skill workshop at a time.
SVV: Before Atoot, there was zero soccer being played within our communities. Girls and women had no opportunity to play or coach, even if it was simply among themselves.
[In Nepal], it is sadly all too common that a girl’s purpose in life is to serve her family - until she eventually becomes a child bride or housewife, and then she serves her new husband and his family.
Atoot first introduced daily soccer sessions in 2019. Today, our programs reach 250-plus girls, 25-plus boys and 600-plus community members, daily. The participants are aged between four and 17 years old.
While we are not a football club, if we were to formally designate ourselves as one then Atoot would be the biggest in Nepal, regardless of gender.
Our numbers and available opportunities exceed anything within Nepal. There are no other grassroots, private or professional clubs with numbers like ours, availing consistent, high-quality football sessions and tournaments.
SVV: We want to bring about hope where there was once none. Our work centres around developing a just and equitable society for girls, where they are afforded the same rights and opportunities as boys and men in their communities.
"Before Atoot, girls had no opportunity to play or coach, even among themselves..."
Through our work, we lead by example, offering top-notch opportunities to girls and showing communities that girls are equally important, can play sports, have a voice, can lead, and be educated and respected in all aspects of society.
Through Atoot’s multi-faceted programming, the needs of young, marginalised girls are directly met, and multiple safe, caring and pro-active spaces are created from within which they can develop.
SVV: We would love to grow our sporting and educational provision, by adding in more aspects of play-based learning and non-traditional teaching.
We hope more girls can benefit from the Atoot program. We want to dig deeper throughout the rural, south Nepali villages and tap into the girls who are not in our program.
However, we are a grassroots organization, with a full-time staff of only six people. We are maxed beyond our capacities every single day.
We can’t sustain what we have, and grow, without greater funding and growth of our team.
Funding simply does not make it to grassroots non-profits, which is a shame, because those working through a local lens are the ones who have the greatest success within the development world.
We hope the funding world will dig deeper to find the organisations they have never heard about, yet enjoy significant successes.
While funding is a challenge, like our girls, we have faced greater ones. And like the girls we work with, Atoot still rises the next day.
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