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A concept we are working on here at Ball Project is helping create more vision & ownership & sustainability for our partners with the resources that already exist in their communities.

We are encouraging our partners to have each team or community to match the Ball Project grant anywhere from a 1:1 to 20:1 ratio, where for each new ball (or 10 balls, or 20 balls) that Ball Project provides, the team/village/school/coach/church needs to come up with another ball for the project.

Along that line, here is an encouraging update from one of our partners in Mozambique:

We will continue to help teams, villages and churches in Mozambique to develop sports programs in poor communities, mainly through soccer schools. We do so by training coaches and teachers on experiential learning.

This year we will extend our action to other Portuguese speaking African countries: Cape Verde Islands, Sao Tomé and Principe, Guinea-Bissau.

Matching makes sense to our groups, although in some cases this is almost impossible. To give you an idea, a cheap soccer ball (not for teams but good for community and church initiatives in South Africa can cost around US$10. In a rural church, this may be 50% of a Sunday offering!!!!

So we usually do other kind of matching, like the community giving the food (locally sourced) and we give the materials. In some of these communities even if they have money, they don’t have anywhere to buy balls.

Anyway, let me try to do a soccer ball matching program of 1:10 or 1:5 depending each case.

This matching program may or may not work, but it is a step in the right direction.

We are thankful for our partners faithfully working each week in their communities around the world to help kids play. & we are thankful for our donors & advisers for encouraging us to work on building our partners’ sustainability & resilience.