The American Who Used Football To Change These Jharkhand Girls’ Lives
To be born a girl in Jharkhand usually involved being sentenced to a life of poverty, illiteracy and violence.
So when Franz Gastler, an American working as an English teacher in a Jharkhand village, was approached by a group of local girls who wanted him to coach their soccer team, he agreed, despite having no experience playing the sport.
He started holding soccer practices — as well as extracurricular classes in English — before and after the girls’ regular school day. The program, which started in 2009, was named Yuwa, derived from the Hindi word yuva for “youth.” Participants would wake up at 4 a.m., attend a class, go to school, return home to work for their families, attend soccer practice and complete their homework. All in a single day.
In less than a decade’s time, Yuwa now runs a full-fledged school with 90 students in its ranks. When it comes to football, the young coaches from the school have helped expand the program to areas near Ormanjhi.
Yuwa is also now the biggest girls’ football program in India, according to its website, with 300 girls participating in the sport. It leases a campus, and Yuwa is planning to purchase land to build a new school and open a residential facility for older students.
The programme covers players from 15 villages, with the coaches also coming from the same villages.
In India, grassroots football programmes for young girls are rare. Yuwa’s project has extended beyond football and has helped in the battle against marriage of underage girls in the area.
“Yuwa does more than simply delay marriage until the age of eighteen — we are enabling girls to break out of the cycle of poverty and make powerful decisions about their future,” Gastler explains.
However, using football to combat child marriage is easier said than done. If a girl doesn’t actively resist, it is often difficult to convince her parents against dropping her out of school and forcing her into a marriage, bemoans Gastler.
“Yuwa girls are usually the first in their families to set their sights on higher education, despite the pressure in their communities to drop out of school and get married,” Franz Gastler says. “By engaging with technology, girls are expanding their world-views and enhancing their employability.”
But despite these hurdles, there is a definite upside to Yuwa’s methods.
Through this strategy of consistently sustained coaching, girls and their families aspire to a future other than becoming a child bride. They are also able to avoid becoming a victim of human trafficking. When a girl is part of a Yuwa team, she becomes a more regular student through the positive peer pressure from her teammates. She pays attention to her own health and to the health of her teammates. She begins to take her future into her own hands. She marries when she chooses — she and her coaches meet her parents to discuss a future other than an early marriage.
“If you don’t know your self-worth, you’ve got no defense against the things that might come at you,” says Franz, “but when you know your worth, you’re limitless. For a girl to know her worth is a weapon.”
And Yuwa girls know their worth.
Watch the Ketto video on Gastler’s inspiring work with Yuwa below
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