Women Win’s Girls in Motion Playbook
Over the last decade sport has increasingly been used as a tool for empowering youth in developing countries. However, opportunities to participate in sport are often designed for and dominated by boys and men. Limitations placed upon adolescent girls and young women restrict them from not only playing sport but fulfilling their potential. We know that sport is empowering, particularly for girls, and that it challenges gender norms. Sport participation offers girls an opportunity to build their self-esteem, leadership, courage and self-efficacy. Through sport programmes, girls' belief in their own ability increases.
These opportunities become even more important in humanitarian settings where girls face an increased violation of their rights. Moreover, through sport adolescent girls can experience some relief from the stresses caused by heightened responsibilities and traumatic experiences often present in humanitarian settings. Lastly, sport offers adolescent girls the opportunity to come together and build support networks. This is particularly important in humanitarian settings given the risks that girls face, but also given the fact that communities have often become disconnected and new social bonds need to be formed to prevent social isolation.
While sport for adolescent girls in humanitarian settings possess high potential, there are also great barriers to ensuring that girls have access to quality and intentionally designed rights-based and trauma-informed programmes. This is due to increased resource constraints, lack of access to materials, the restricted movement of girls and the challenge of securing a safe space.
Women Win has identified a strong need for tools specifically designed for adolescent girls in humanitarian settings. Our upcoming Girls in Motion Playbook will support organisations and practitioners to design, develop and deliver adolescent girl-centred and rights-based sport programmes in humanitarian contexts around the world. It will offer an overview of the key guidelines as well as useful steps and best practices for sport programming for adolescent girls in a variety of humanitarian contexts.
The Girls in Motion Playbook has greatly relied on the experiences and learnings from our implementing partners and other organisations using sport with girls in humanitarian settings. From girls living in Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps in Kachin, Myanmar, who started accompanying each other to collect water after joining local volleyball teams run by our partner Girl Determined, to South Sudanese women creating bonds through traditional dancing programmes implemented by our partner Community Psychosocial Support Organisation (CPSO) in northern Uganda’s refugee settlements, this toolkit could not have been created without their expertise.
The purpose of this Playbook is to offer guidance to humanitarian actors, development practitioners, community workers, field officers and project or programme staff on how to design sport programmes that benefit adolescent girls in a variety of humanitarian settings including IDP camps, rural or urban settlements, (natural) disaster-affected communities, and refugee camps. We acknowledge that a lot has been written about creating sport programmes for adolescent girls, developing sport programmes for youth in humanitarian settings and designing general gender-sensitive programming in conflict and post conflict contexts. Our toolkit aims to address the intersection of these approaches and hopefully fills an information gap that currently exists.
Women Win also offers human-centred design workshops and programme design consultation for organisations engaging girls through sport in humanitarian settings.
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