Transform a Girl's Life Through Soccer

Ladies’ Turn had a great spring! After pausing for the month of Ramadan until mid-April, we organized 12 mini tournaments for 300 girls and 60 boys from 6 elementary schools in the Yoff neighborhood of Dakar. This is part of our fight for gender sports equality in schools.

Right now, at elementary schools, there are no physical education (PE) classes for girls, only boys. So we decided to change this and organize soccer at schools to pressure the school system to start offering PE for girls. Of course our choice of sport would be soccer! As Seyni, our President says, our slogan has evolved from “Girls’ soccer in the heart of the neighborhood!” to now “Girls’ soccer within the school walls!”.

We held the mini tournaments on Wednesdays and Saturdays. We mixed up teams of girls and boys from different schools so they could all meet and play together. This also helped us put together teams of similar ages and sizes. We hope by having boys play with girls that they will grow up thinking this is normal and that girls can play soccer too.

We’ve now been working with these schools in Yoff for two years and as always it was a blast! The teachers were excellent coaches, and the girls has so much fun! We closed the activities for the summer break and for the Tabaski (Eid al Adha) celebration in mid-June.

Thank you for making these moments of joy and opportunity for girls to play soccer in Senegal possible! Your support is invaluable and helped us pilot this program and attract further resources to it.

At the global level, I hope you enjoyed the thrill of women’s soccer in Paris! Seyni was featured on the Olympics website in the lead up to the games. 

Looking forward to the day some of these girls play soccer at the Olympics!

Nio Far, In Solidarity,

Jennifer and the Ladies’ Turn Team

P.S. For more cute pictures, check out our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AssociationLadiesTurn

Links:

• Olympics.com Article on Seyni Ndir Seck
• Ladies' Turn Facebook Page

Our efforts to expand sports for girls in elementary schools in Senegal continue! Currently, elementary schools in Senegal are not required to offer physical education and sports for girls. We are changing that by organizing soccer in 6 primary schools in the Yoff Village in Senegal’s capital, Dakar. Our goal is to demonstrate how important sports are for young girls too and to pressure the Senegalese Ministry of Education and local government officials to commit to offering sports, including soccer, for girls across elementary schools in Dakar and eventually the entire country.  

In January, we started activities in the 6 elementary schools with 300 girls. We are organizing practices on Wednesdays and Saturdays afternoons when students go to school for a halfday in the morning. Check out this cute video of the girls learning ball skills. We will organize 12 mini tournaments after the month of Ramadan which started Sunday evening. To make sure that boys are used to girls playing soccer from an early age, we also included 10 boys from each elementary school in the activities.

Last year, your donations let us launch this program that we had wanted to do for years and prove that it was a good investment. Based on that success, we were able to find additional funding for girls’ soccer in elementary schools. We were selected for a grant from La Guilde under their Paris Impact 2024 Initiative and also from the French “REI” Decathlon. So the program continues!

We didn’t do an end of the year fundraising drive. So if you feel called, please consider making a donation to Ladies’ Turn in honor of International Women’s Day last week and women’s history month!

In any case, thank you SO MUCH for your continued support.

Nio far, In Solidarity,

Jennifer and the Ladies’ Turn Team