Help youth have access to safe spaces to play and learn

Covid-19 Status in Uganda

Uganda has been going through the second wave of Covid-19, and we are still in our second lockdown with little hope of getting the vaccine. The small amount of donated doses we are receiving go to essential workers and teachers who are a priority right now.

Schools and churches are still closed and no large gatherings are allowed for now. For many families in our community, parents have been home with children who live with them in small houses with no food.. This has resulted in many issues including:

• Domestic violence: almost every day we have cases of children beaten seriously by parents, their parents fighting and all other forms of violence
• Child labor: some of our players have left training completely and are doing stone quarrying
• Early pregnancy: we have registered one pregnancy and another one aborted in our team
• Early marriages have also increased

The situation of kids being home has resulted in so many issues. We have had some rise in the cases of Covid-19 in early September And we could be heading for a third wave.

What are we trying to do?

Kigezi Soccer Academy knows the importance of our training sessions for our community. We need to resume training and all other programs like Covid-19 awareness games we use in partnership with international NGO, Coaches Across Continents. It is crucial that we deliver a message to the youth and to their parents, hold talks where we bring inspirational speakers and councilors, and other essential social programs. The COVID situation is preventing us from serving the vulnerable young people in our community and the neighboring districts. With more resources we will be able to ensure that (#) of youth have access to safe spaces to play and learn.

The urgent need:

Though the schools and churches are still closed, the President allowed sports to resume but only by following the Standard Operating Procedures. We realized that our field of play is accessed by everyone in the community which creates some safety issues when it comes to our children. We now see the urgent need to have a wire mesh fence around the field of play so that our children can feel and be safe every day, giving hope for their future.

We have budgeted the fence at $3000 including the costs of the materials and labour.

The fenced field will secure the children from the rest of the community and will ease our work of putting all the SOPs into practice.

We wish to begin this work as soon as we get the resources we need.