Immaculate ‘Chocho’ Nalwadda: Uplifting girls through sports

Nalwadda posing with the slum kid’s team after a football match. PHOTO BY ISMAIL KEZAALA

Like any other slum around Kampala, Mulimira Zone in Bukoto, home to more than 20,000 youths, is extremely crowded, lacks basic sanitary infrastructure and many of the inhabitants are prone to preventable sicknesses and daily injuries from street fights among gangs. The situation is even worse for girls who are exposed to sexual abuse and early pregnancies.

Despite such prohibitive conditions, Nalwadda, commonly known as Chocho, made it out of the slum and is now one of the most influential female leaders in Ugandan sport.

The KCCA youth councillor representing Nakawa Division, a position to which she was elected in 2016, draws from her experience to raise the hopes of the disadvantaged youth. She is using the only available one-acre open land, codenamed ‘cow dung’, as a sports ground.

A future in basketball
Nalwadda never expected to become a basketball player. In her primary school at Kalinaabiri in Ntinda, she was a sprinter running the 100 and 200 metres and sometimes played football with boys in the neighbourhood.
This early exposure to unisex sport built her confidence, which made her excel as a player. In 2002, she obtained a scholarship at Crane High School which set her on the way to a successful sports career.

In both school and sport, she showed tremendous potential for success. Nalwadda was offered a talented Young Scholars government scholarship to Kyambogo University, where she captained the basketball team before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, thus fulfilling her dream of becoming an engineer.

At Kyambogo, Nalwadda became aware of the different treatment given toward male and female athletes.

“Whenever teams were selected to participate in the East Africa University Games, they always sent the men and not the women. The university told us there was no money, but that was not something new. Women have always been marginalised; when there is little money, women are the first to be excluded,” Nalwadda says.

Spurred on by the inequality she encountered, Nalwadda ran for president of the Games Union, Kyambogo University’s student guild council.

After winning the election, she was elected as a student-athlete representative to the National University Sports Federation of Uganda - NUSFU (currently known as the Association of Ugandan University Sports - AUUS).

“Sport transforms people so they can live better lives not just for themselves but for their communities at large. If sports could empower me as a woman in the slum into the person I am today, it can empower any woman in Uganda.”

Getting into advocacy
Throughout the years, Nalwadda’s passion for advocacy and gender equality has made her one of the most influential female leaders in Ugandan sport. In 2013, her leadership attracted the attention of the Uganda Olympic Committee (UOC), which appointed her to its women and sports commission.
One year later, Nalwadda was selected to participate in the Women’s Sports Leadership Academy at the University of Chichester.

In 2016, she won an election to her current position as youth councilor.
During all of this time, Nalwadda found a way to balance her many responsibilities and complete a master’s degree in Olympic Studies from the German Sport University Cologne, while still playing basketball in the national women’s league with Magic Stormers, working as a software developer, and running her own tomato sauce manufacturing company.

“I want to make sure girls can look up to me for worthwhile reasons. I want to show them that sports, education, and empowerment are all connected,” she says.

Through her work, Nalwadda plans to address the lack of sport facilities, sponsorship, and support for women’s sports, as well as challenge negative social stereotypes that pressure women to leave sport.
“Our women’s professional leagues are stagnant, so they realise they cannot make money in sports and leave. Our athletes are very vulnerable too.”

Building bridges
She draws inspiration from not only her difficult past but also from super women such as her late mother Teopista Kigongo, Miriam Matembe as well as Winnie Madikizela Mandela. This is why she soldiers on.

“I was inspired by situations around me. I had belief that when I join leadership, I would change some things and inequalities women face and also be able to help lift the ghetto child from their dehumanising conditions of living,” she says.

Nalwadda runs a successful football league in Mulimira Zone that helps the ghetto youths live positively while rehabilitating others from drugs.
Apart from the three teams that play from the cow dung playground, which was reclaimed from a dumping site, the group of about 80 youth have started a self-help group where each member contributes Shs2,000 every Sunday.

One of the members, Ambrose Birungi, 36, has spent 20 years in the slum but was motivated to run for the local council elections where he lost to the incumbent.

“I wanted to show the world that we (youth in the ghetto) still have a chance in life,” Birungi said in an interview at their meeting place which he offered to the youth freely.

The change is there for everyone to see in 23-year-old Arafat Nyanzi, the coach of the U9, U12 and U14 teams, a rehabilitated drug addict who prefers to pass on football knowledge to the young ones every evening. He was trained by Right to Play.

The area LCI chairman, Joseph Kakooza Sande hailed the project as a positive initiative. “Some youths now fear smoking marijuana, especially in Kinanansi (a community near Kamwokya) because they see their peers behaving differently,” Kakooza said.

Challenges abound
But what they call home is under serious threat. According to Oloya Oyaro, the custodian of the land, much as he appreciates the importance of the space, it belongs to his boss who he refuses to name.

“We have no problem with their stay provided nothing permanent is set up,” he said pointing to the MTN mast that was erected on the far end of the land on a 20-year contract in 2009.

He adds that the lack of a connecting route to the main road is holding back plans of putting the land to use. If this is secured, the hopes of the children will be torn to shreds like the t-shirts they don to chase their dream.

Nalwadda’s lessons
•The bigger the challenge, the more rewarding it is to complete.
•You can always push yourself harder than you think you can.
•Goals become real once you commit to them.
• The hardest part is often getting started.