Aliguma’s road to secure youth facility begins with Uefa help

Although major strides are being made to use sport to improve livelihoods among youths, there continues to be barriers especially for children in slum areas where playing spaces are critically lacking.

In Uganda where football is among the leading tools for improving such lives and securing them opportunities, concerns abound. Fortunately, simple interventions like slum soccer are helping transform the wretched of the urban dwellers.

Enter Aliguma Foundation
Having realised the need to create a major social change, former Uganda Sports Press Association (Uspa) vice president Ritah Aliguma, used her influence to lure European football’s governing body, Uefa to offer a hand in her initiative of developing slum soccer in Uganda.

The Aliguma Foundation which promotes accessibility to sports while providing life skills to young people is tapping into the potential of the dense population of Acholi Quarters, one of Kampala’s biggest slums in Banda, Nakawa Division, which is dominated by people who escaped the Joseph Kony insurgency in northern Uganda.

It is a place of homeless people most of whom barely afford basics of life. Actually most of the land owners in the area benefitted from the land giveaway by the Kabaka of Buganda in the early 2000s. Living on the edge, even to the budding footballers, life can manifest itself with harsh reality.

But just last week, Uefa president Aleksander Čeferin handed the Aliguma Foundation sports kits including balls, goal nets and jerseys courtesy to provide a starting point for the football players that routinely cram the dusty (also muddy) community field in search of a better future.

“I met Mr. Čeferin through the Aips president Gianni Merlo. I shared the vision of my foundation with him and he committed to help us with sports kits which he did,’’ said Aliguma who started the Aliguma Foundation in 2017.

The beneficiaries were obviously happy as they lined up in hundreds to watch an exhibition game between Police and Tigers, which the former won 2-1.

Changing lives
Banda is the place where Aliguma identified Nicole Apio, a student of Crane High Entebbe and helped her attend the Aips Young Reporters Program in Italy in June this year.

Čeferin, has joined other partners; KitAid UK, Kampala Rotary Club and the National Council of Sports (NCS) to donate to the Aliguma Foundation.

Yet this is just the beginning of the long journey. Aliguma has set her eyes on establishing a permanent home for the children in Masindi.

For now, some 20 children from her Foundation will attain freed education at Shepherds House and Abato Junior School, all based in Mpigi District where the Foundation secured scholarships.