Transform a Girl's Life Through Soccer

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