The YDF Toolkit - a future-oriented concept
The Youth Development through Football (YDF) project
pursues a mission: It intends to transform coaches into social workers
and social workers into coaches to exploit the educational potential of
sport. To maximise this potential, coaches need socio-pedagogical skills
and social workers need the corresponding knowledge relating to sport
and exercise theory. Both are provided in YDF's Toolkit. Based on the
wish to make the world a slightly better place by overcoming
discrimination, bringing about the equality of the sexes, promoting
health, combating illness and violence and ensuring environmental
sustainability, the enthusiasm of girls and boys for football is used as
a means of initiating educational processes.
The role model character of coaches as leading thought
Coaches have a unique responsibility in this context. On
the one hand, they help the youth whose hearts beat for football to
realise their dreams of becoming fine football players and perhaps even
playing in a great team one day. On the other hand they set an example,
are their advisors and guides and accompany them along their respective
paths. Few people are born as ‘role models' though and football coaches
are no exception. Not only do they need to become aware of the huge
responsibility which they bear, they must also learn to live up to it.
This is, where the Toolkit comes into play again.
Combining football techniques and social skills
The manuals for coach training and coaches strike a
balance between imparting skills related to football techniques and
social skills, and in weaving these two important elements together. The
manuals use classic football exercises to teach social skills like
trust, dependability, self-awareness and the ability to work in a team,
qualities that every footballer needs – but which are as important
beyond the football field. And they combine football with educational
sessions or add-ons that focus on the prevention of violence and
HIV/AIDS and raising the environmental awareness of girls and boys. The
manuals deal with complex matters in simple, clear and understandable
language. The YDF-Toolkit focuses on football: Football is easy to play,
needs few equipment and is the most popular sport all over the world.
Nevertheless, most exercises are easily transferable to other team
sports as well.
A tool in motion
The YDF Toolkit is not static. It rather grows with the
experience of the participants, which are consciously and purposefully
incorporated in order to flow into the continued development of the
manuals. It is precisely this conscious recourse to the experiences of
the practitioners on site that makes the manuals a valuable tool for
education. Its flexibility also allows to respond to the specific
educational needs of individual countries by setting different focal
points, like water and sanitation hygiene in Zambia, or HIV/AIDS
prevention in Lesotho.
Training instructors and coaches
Responding to the positive reception of the Toolkit on various
levels, YDF's project partner, the Department of Sport and Recreation
South Africa has decided to integrate it into its Mass Participation
Programme as official educational and training material. It currently
undergoes the necessary accreditation process. But YDF not only provides
the toolkit, it also facilitates the training of coach instructors and
coaches in all its ten African partner countries. To date, approximately
100 instructors have been trained and function as multipliers and
messengers for the concept of youth development through sport. Over the
same period, more than 750 coaches have been trained in the use of
football coaching as an extra-mural learning platform to effect social
change.
The tools listed below have been developed in cooperation with or
entirely by other GIZ departments and local partners. Our tools offer
strategies and lessons learned from the field development through
football, to create sustainable change—both in the communities and in
the individuals of all ages who participate in these efforts.
