Girls soccer in Brazil, changing gender norms

We are very excited to be able to share with you some great news: we have started a new initiative within our project which will enable us to offer sporting activities to many more girls and also, we hope, establish a model for our city by which the communities around schools will be benefited by access to sports that they currently don't have.

One of the chief characteristics of our community is the density of the population and paucity of public leisure facilities. Our community  covers only 3 square miles and yet has a population of 65,000 people (our municipality has the second highest population density in all Brazil) and has 16 public schools, which is important guaranteeing all children access to free education. However we only have one small park with a dirt soccer pitch in the middle and there are a further 3 public  hard courts where we currently develop our work. As schools work in shifts of children and teachers, they do not offer any extra curricular activities and children end up spending almost all the time they are not in school at home playing on electronic devices. This brings very negative consequences for their physical health and also for their emotional and mental health which already suffered a lot during the pandemic. Whilst the middle and high schools have 3 shifts of children with classes going from 7 in the moring until 11 at night, the elementary schools, which all have a hard court for PE lessons, only have classes from 7am to 6pm.

One of the elementary schools, EM Fabíola de Lima Goyano, has a hard court which is accessible from the street without having to enter the school buildings and in a conversation with the head teacher we identified an opportunity to create a whole new community facitlity functioning from 6pm to 10pm Monday to Friday and from 8am to 6pm on weekends whereby ACER Brazil would be responsible for managing the court and offering structured activities to the community. From this beginning and with the support of a city councilman, after 4 months of negotiations, we finally got to sign a formal partnership with the city government and, as you can see in the photos that accompany this report, we are already delivering classes in the evenings to over 30 new girls who previously had no access to sports. Effectively we have created a brand new community facility without having to have public investment in building and equipment - a goal scored for all!