SE Sports club recently participated in the ‘Keep Playing: Train the Coaches’ programme with Liverpool Football Club (LFC) and its principal partner Standard Chartered. The training took place in Nairobi and focused on supporting girls to stay at the club and grow through sport.
Liverpool Football Club and the multinational bank jointly launched the ‘Keep Playing’ campaign in 2023 to inspire, empower and educate girls to participate in sport after learning that twice as many girls as boys quit playing sport before the age of 14. Standard Chartered Future Makers is a global youth economic empowerment initiative that aims to tackle inequality and promote greater economic inclusion.
Following the success of a digital campaign featuring Liverpool’s (LFC nickname) senior player and head coach Jurgen Klopp, the ‘Keep Playing: Train the Trainers’ programme was developed as a live, hands-on training with Standard Chartered working with a larger group of coaches and female participants.
In Nairobi, coaches from the LFC International Academy and SES Foundation provided three days of training to 35 VAP, local community and academy coaches to enhance their skills and help girls in their communities succeed through football. The workshops combined classroom and on-pitch learning, covering a people-centred approach, addressing barriers to participation, mental health and wellbeing, balancing life and empowering female leadership.
“As coaches, we do more than just teach football. We instil important values that enable young people to succeed on and off the pitch,” said Karl Carney, Liverpool FC Foundation’s Sports and Physical Activity Manager. “It was great to see the passion and commitment the coaches in Nairobi showed after completing the workshops, and we are excited to see the impact they have on their communities.”
After completing a series of daily tasks, the Kenyan coaches developed their own lesson plans based on the course schedule and lessons learned, which they then took back to their local communities to teach the girls. The first ‘Keep Going’ training took place in Pretoria, South Africa in November 2023, with the 34 participating coaches going on to train 3,600 girls.
Summarising the impact he envisions through partnerships and projects such as ‘Play On’, Wade Hassan Selman, CEO of SE Sports club, said: “We believe in the power and popularity of sport as a tool to help achieve social and economic change for the most vulnerable in society.”
