Alistair Burt MP, avid Man Utd supporter, is the latest reporter from Rwanda. Previous blogs have been submitted by Nick Hurd MP and Andrew Mitchell MP.
Rwanda loves its football. European games are watched avidly, and there is a thriving national league. National facilities have been much improved by Fifa, but my experience of two years ago was that at grass roots level the twenty seven soccer centres around the country lacked the most basic facilities available to boys and girls in the UK. It is here that our work is targeted.
With the support of the Rwandan FA, Football Umubano is delivering a high quality coaching package to assist coaching for thousands of children here. Thirty two coaches of young footballers from all over the country have been brought to Kigali for a week’s course being run by our FA, which has generously partnered us, and delivered by the National Grass Roots Director of Coaching Les Howie. For a week, these coaches work every day, firstly in the classroom, followed by time out on the pitch amongst themselves. Then, after a break for lunch and the midday heat, we are out on the pitch again for a couple of hours with nearly a hundred youngsters from Kigali. The coaches deliver the new training games and ideas Les has given them, carefully packing away his expertise to take home.
At the beginning of next week, Football Umubano takes to the road. Gavin Stepp, an FA Skills Coach arriving today, and I will visit eight of these soccer centres around the country. From Butare to Gyseni, we will run a skills session assisted by the local coach for the upto three hundred boys and girls who will attend each one. Through the kindness of the FA, Kit-Aid, and various household name English Clubs, we will leave over three hundred footballs and nearly 750 football shirts here. But more than that. We will be supporting the coach, whose role as mentor to young people should not be taken for granted, and who will work with the quality skills delivered by the FA this fortnight to inspire their youngsters. They will not all be the next Drogba. But as much as any child in the world, they deserve the fun of childhood stolen from those just a few years older. They deserve a football, not the bundle of rags and bags tied up with a rubber band which the village children now play with, and they deserve the luxury of play which only comes from safety.
When I asked clubs for help with the project, West Ham sent me a dozen shirts. I then had a call to say that their staff had had a close look at a picture I had sent them of children playing football in a village, and realised that they were not playing with a ball at all. They were so moved that they sent me 100 footballs, and, after a whip round, £1286 as well.
Every time I hand out one of those 100 footballs I will know that through football, Project Umubano is delivering for now, and for the future, just a little bit of the love, and the game, that binds the world a little closer together and I will be proud I am here.