KAF empowers girls through sport, education, and leadership, creating safe, inclusive pathways for confidence, opportunity, and social change.
In Pakistan, sport is disproportionately a male domain. National estimates suggest that more than 90 percent of girls never participate in organised sports at any point in their lives (Laar et al., 2019). The gap between male and female participation is structural, produced by the intersection of cultural norms, infrastructural deficits, and institutional neglect that operate across every level of social life, from the household to the school to the state. Within this national picture, Chitral occupies a particularly complex position. Located in the northern tip of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering Afghanistan and sharing ecological and cultural terrain with the broader Hindu Kush Himalaya, Chitral is a region with a proud sporting heritage. The Shandur Polo Festival, held at 3,700 metres, is internationally recognised as one of the highest- altitude polo grounds in the world. Yet that heritage is almost entirely male. While cricket, football, and volleyball tournaments for men are held regularly across Chitral, women of the region have been largely absent from formal sporting spaces, confined to domestic roles by norms that intensify precisely when girls are most physically capable of athletic development. This report asks why that is, what it costs, and what can be done about it.
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