“There are times when sport can become a tool through which we discover a new world, a new environment, new people, behaviours and lifestyle.” This is one of the objectives of a project that has been running in Tanzania for more than a year now, seeking to use sport as a means to improving the life chances and self-confidence of girls and women in one of Africa’s remotest and poorest areas.
The Italian non-governmental organisation (NGO) CO.PE has been working with local school children of all ages to promote hockey in East Africa, so the Jambo Hockey tournament was an ideal opportunity to put skills into action.
And if you wanted to learn about hockey from the experts, who better to invite than some players from the country ranked number one in the world when it comes to women’s hockey, the Netherlands. This particular project started as part of a football programme called Clublinking, which is run by the Dutch Football Association, but was extended to hockey through a collaboration with CO.P.E.
CO.P.E. is run by Italian hockey player Valentina Quaranta. While the project aims to develop hockey from the grass-roots level upwards, Valentina came to Tanzania with a second ambition – she pledged to re-form the Tanzanian women’s national hockey team. Among the challenges she faced as she began re-forming the national side were limited funds and equipment, and a lack of opposition. The fact that Tanzania women’s team competed in the 2014 Hockey World League Round One event is testimony to the enormous strides CO.P.E. with the Tanzania Hockey Association has made in the past 12 months. The Clublinking project promises to continue to assist with the challenges – in particular equipment and teams to play against – the Jambo Hockey adventure was not a one-off, Clublinking will continue to support the project in the future.
Valentina and her team’s vision has been given a boost through the excellent support of the Tanzania Hockey Association and the players and their families from the Rijwiske Hockey Club (RHC) from the Netherlands, who threw themselves whole-heartedly into the Clublinking programme.
Over a 10-day period, the visiting Dutch team ran training sessions for more than 300 pupils in schools in the area; held friendly matches against the Tanzanian women’s side, Twende; ran a school hockey tournament involving 100 youngsters from five primary schools from the capital city Dar-Es-Salaam; and played a match against the national U16 team from neighbouring Kenya. Over the course of the programme, the RHC players and members of Twende mixed together to run coaching, lead teams and generally ensure that the players all had a meaningful and enjoyable experience – all centred around hockey.
The RHC team also brought with them a large amount of equipment that was donated to the local players. Sticks, shoes, balls and goalkeeping equipment was distributed throughout primary and secondary schools in the area.
In return, the Dutch players were welcomed into the houses of the Tanzanian team, where they experienced cooking and eating local food and saw just how their new hockey-playing colleagues lived and the daily challenges they faced.
