oval club

Empower My Life training camp was held at Sadili Oval over a ten day period (16 th to 26 th August 2017). The camp, the second one since April 2017, was organized by Sadili Oval Sports Academy in partnership with Swiss Academy for Development (SAD). A total of 196 children , whose ages ranged from 4 to 15, participated in the camp. Most of the kids came from two of Nairobi’s informal settlements: Kijiji and Kibera, which are only a few kilometers apart.  Each day of the camp, the kids met at Sadili at 9:00 am and had one-hour warm-up sessions with guidance from Sadili coaches. The warm-up sessions were swiftly followed by new games, each coming with lessons. The kids were divided into 4 groups, according to their ages, and each group had at least two coaches playing with them and facilitating discussions. Judging from their enthusiasm, it was quite evident that the kids enjoyed learning the games. After each game, the kids sat down with their coaches to discuss what lessons the...

Emmanuel Mayaka   Emmanuel Mayaka is a nine year old pupil at Kid Star Primary School. The class register indicates that he is one of the pupils in his class who has been consistently attending school. He is also one of very few pupils in his school who reported to school on 4th January 2017, the official opening day for schools. Many other pupils reported the following week. Emmanuel is just one of the many pupils in his class whose general attitude towards school has improved since they joined the programme. “Emmanuel, just like many of his classmates, likes coming to the Kibera Tennis court to play,” says his class teacher. “Playing sports, specifically tennis, with guidance from trained coaches is not very common in Kibera. This probably explains the reason they are always excited about running down to the court. The result as we have observed is increased engagement and less absenteeism”. “I live far from the tennis court, so I can only come there during school days with ...

Denzel Ochieng Denzel is a standard 2 pupil at Jitahidi primary School. Records from the class register provided to us by his class teacher shows a steady increase in attendance since he joined our programme. His class teacher believes that the court of dreams programme has played a key role in improving Denzel’s and other pupils’ attitudes towards school. “As you can see our school does not have a playing space, and so your court [Kibera tennis court] is the only one available for them. Our pupils, particularly Denzel, have always been very excited about getting down to the tennis court,” says his class teacher. “I have said it before and I still maintain that I hope the programme will keep going on, so that our kids have space to play, and have a good motivation at least once a week to be in school.” “During the December holidays I had time to play at the tennis court every day. Now that we are back to school, I will be looking forward to our play days [Wednesdays],” says Denzel....