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