Words by Smiley Team
The Girls Money Savvy Project Through Sport, organised by the Sport Aid Developement Trust, has been announced as one of four winners of the 2020 Sport for Gender Equality Collective Impact Award supported by Comic Relief and the BT Supporter’s Club.
All four organisations will receive significant investment to work together over the course of the year to use sport to develop a collective approach to advance gender equality and society as a whole.
The Zambian project has been recognised for how the organisation uses football and adaptable sports to mobilise girls to learn about financial literacy through participatory learning.
The Girls Money Savvy Project trains peer leaders as communication change agents who later form Leadership Action Groups in their respective schools, creating sustainable structures for project coordination.
The peer to peer education communicates financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills in a friendlier manner that resonate with girls’ experiences necessitates, having a lifelong impact on the girls. In addition, the Peer leaders become the mentors to the girls being educated.
The project incorporates financial literacy through football in the form of life skills drills. This enables the trained peer leaders to educate and inspire their peers, helping them to assimilate their new knowledge for their personal development.
Now in its 12th year, the 2020 Beyond Sport Global Awards will celebrate, support, raise awareness and provide funding for ways sport is being used to help make the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals a reality.
This 2020 Beyond Sport Collective Impact Award has a focus on gender equality. In its second year, this cutting-edge program will increase support and investment to a group of organisations to work together to share best practice and work through issues in real-time to create community-driven solutions to accelerate sustainable impact through sport.
The initiative will invest £225,000 in grant funding and a comprehensive business support package in four organizations across eastern and southern Africa that are using sport to progress Goal 5 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls and, in turn, advance society as a whole.
The initial financial resources given to the girls as a revolving fund help the girls start their financial independence journey that is sustained by continued mentorship by the peer leaders who are also running businesses.
Paul Zulu, Founder of, Sport-Aid Development Trust was delighted to win the award:
"Winning this award is a dream come true and career fulfilled. On the other hand, it gives me a sense of responsibility and impetus to keep on reaching out to the unreached girls and disadvantaged children in the unreached places with the message of hope and empowerment.”
