East Africa Cup Kick-off Coach Education System

The East Africa Cup, one of the most successful and well known sport and development tournaments in Africa, is to be used as a platform to support the recognition, trainingand development of community coaches in the region.

Run under the banner ‘much more than only sport’ the East Africa Cup is held annually in Tanzania and incorporates education, culture and life skills development as well as sport activity. Over 1,300 participants from Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda take part in the event organised and coordinated by CHRISC East Africa, MYSA Kenya, Norwegian People’s Aid and KRIK Norway.

In March the organisations responsible for running the Cup initiated a community coach education system project that has been named the East Africa community Coach Education System (EACCES). The EACCES initiative focuses in part on maximising coach development opportunities at the Cup. However, the main thrust of the project is to establish a coordinated system to recognise, coordinate and support the on-going training and development of community coaches in participating organisations’ home environments.

“The theme of this year’s cup is “one week in Moshi, one year in the community,” explained East Africa Cup Organising Committee Chairman George Kamau. “The community coaching systems project alignes closely with this concept focusing on developing guidelines that can enhance the overall development of community coaches within our organisations.”

A number of training programmes are already in place across agencies participating in the East Africa Cup. EACCES aims to formalise the recognition, understanding and support for this training while identifying what can add value to the programmes already in place.

“The EACCES is not about duplicating existing training, instead it is about highlighting what training is appropriate for coaches with different levels of experience and recognising this across our organisations,” Kamau said. “The system will also allow us to recognise good practice but also develop gap areas, not only in training, but the ongoing support and monitoring of our coaches.”

“When we talk about community coaching and sport leadership in sport-for-development organisations it is clear that the sport aspect is important, but so is the coach’s role in supporting life skill development, organising community members and ensuring the participants are safe.”

“Through EACCES we will look at systematically identifying these different key skills required by community coaches, formally documenting and recognising this.”

For more information on the East Africa Cup visit http://eacup.org/.