Yuwa has an interesting agenda—girl child empowerment in the tribal belt of Jharkhand through football.
What brings Franz Gastler to India or rather what keeps him in the rural interiors of Jharkhand? Consulting with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), working on corporate social strategies...but even before that let’s go back to his youth... a BA and an MA in International Political Economy from the University Professors Programme at Boston University and certificates in negotiation and mediation from the Programme on Negotiation at Harvard Law School...interning at the Ministry of Finance in Bogota, Colombia... India is so far and such a far cry from his part of the world. So what brought him here; how did it all begin?
We shoot a series of questions at the Executive Director and Founder of Yuwa, a not-for-profit programme that is working on empowerment of the girl child in the tribal belt of Jharkhand, through the unique medium of football!
Meeting Gastler itself was an eye-opener of sorts. We had gone to Hutup, this remote village in the interiors of the extremist infested jungles, expecting a bearded old American gent, probably some missionary on a philanthropic agenda. The 30 something handsome young football coach with his easy laughter and friendly banter came as a pleasant surprise. It is easy to understand the tremendous fan following that he has cultivated amid his little protégés and the village folk in the last five years or so of his stay in Jharkhand.
Coming back to Gastler’s history, a lot had to do with his choice of subjects in academia. “I wrote my master’s thesis on how companies and NGOs can partner to combat poverty and my most interesting professor was from Pakistan, and some of my most interesting classmates were from India. A lot of the most intriguing NGOs were also in India. So after university I was searching for opportunities in South Asia.” A chance meeting with Sam Pitroda in Chicago paved the way. “He connected me with the CII.” Here he had the opportunity to work with leaders in the private sector who were just starting to get involved in social initiatives through the CSR agenda. But that was just the beginning.
As says Gastler, “After a year-and-a-half of wearing a suit and tie in the forty-degree Delhi heat, I was ready to leave office life behind and do something more meaningful and get my boots muddy.” That brought him to a tribal nook in Jharkhand when he took up a job with an NGO. But instead of opting to stay in one of the towns, he moved into a mud house in a village and started teaching English at a local government school. “That gave me a chance to connect with kids.”
Gastler returned to New York after working five months in Jharkhand to work with his favourite professor from university. But he had left his heart in Jharkhand, India. “I soon decided I wanted to go back to India—to Jharkhand—and work again with the kids I’d met before.” It was upon his second coming to the village that an off the cuff remark by one of his little students started the process for the Yuwa programme to take shape. “When I returned to Jharkhand, a girl who’d been in my English class and who I’d given a scholarship to study at a better school said she wanted to play football. I told her if she started a team, I’d coach it. I didn’t think that it would be such a powerful platform for empowerment.”
So what is this Yuwa programme? Gastler has mapped out its benefits clearly. “Society teaches girls to fit in. We coach girls to stand out,” he says. Gastler had his reasons for selecting girls’ empowerment as also sports as a medium to empower them. He quotes Kofi Annan, former secretary general of United Nations to highlight the importance of educating girls: it is ‘the single highest returning social investment in the world today’.
Spelling out the need for educating the girl Yuwa website quotes some hard facts:
• A girl with seven years of education marries 4 years later, and has 2.2 fewer children
• When an educated girl earns income, she reinvests 90% of it in her family, compared to 35% for a boy
• The population’s HIV rate goes down and malnutrition decreases 43%
• If 10 % more girls go to secondary school, the country’s economy grows 3 per cent
• Yet 99.4% of international aid money is not directed to her
The choice of Jharkhand was also dictated by the abysmal female development indices of the state. More than six in 10 women in the state can’t read. Jharkhand leads Indian states in child marriages and an estimated 30,000 girls from here are trafficked every year. The other factor that compounds the woes of the tribal belt girls is the topographical isolation of the interior belt that denies her exposure.
Yuwa brings a large number of at-risk girls girls out of isolation and into a positive team environment. Daily practice and a team platform gives them confidence to rewrite the script of illiteracy, early marriage, pregnancy and poverty by breaking the vicious cycle.
Football as a team sport acts as an effective model of grassroots organisation in Yuwa. It is a model of local talent where coaches to the executive director, are all sourced from the same local pool. But what’s even more unique is the ownership structure of the team. The players, specifically girls between 5-17 years old with an average and median age of 12 years, are in charge of their own programme. They buy their own football, find their fields and set their own practice schedules. Apart from the sweat equity, a player is required to contribute financially as well, for instance, a third of the price of the football boots that she becomes eligible to after completing four months’ compulsory attendance. This calls for ingenuity and diligence in poor girls who must find their own means of funding. With the team and the coaches cheering on, she always does. That’s the USP of Yuwa.
In a direct contrast to how the game is commonly played amongst the rich kids, Yuwa has more players and less footballs and a community coach instead of a professional one. Thus, it teaches the players the values of peer-to-peer coaching, frugality and collective effort.
Gastler rightly declares, “When a girl joins a Yuwa team, a new world opens up to her. She gets connected with quality education, learns about her body and her rights, and becomes a role model for hundreds of girls in her community. Her journey begins with football.” The quality education that the girls receive at Yuwa, unlocks a world of possibility. “Yuwa girls use technology to discover English, math, and science and defy the odds—and define their own future,” adds the coach. The results of the programme are visible. Yuwa sent the first team ever from India to play in Spain in the Donosti Cup and Gasteiz Cup, 2013. Its team of 18 players won bronze at Gasteiz Cup (Spain) 2013. Three of its players have been selected for the India National U-13 team and 19 have made it into Jharkhand state teams. It is team Yuwa’s girls who have lifted Jharkhand state’s national ranking to 4th, up from 20th. Twenty girls from Yuwa’s first team are now leading practices for its six new teams. Two girls are even coaching a young boys’ team.
Little wonder then that from 15 girls in a single hamlet organised by one girl, Yuwa has grown past 200 girls in 10 villages practicing daily, with more girls coming and new team lists being published regularly. On the education front too, the changes are all positive. Yuwa girls attend school five days per week on an average after one year of joining the outfit, compared to three days per week on average earlier. These girls are also often the first in their families to attend college. The social welfare and awareness network of Yuwa has ensured increased identification and treatment of girls whose illnesses are often ignored. The mentorship and family counseling programme is successfully identifying and combating cases of child marriage and addressing issues of domestic abuse and abuse outside of the home. Through weekly workshops, Yuwa girls learn about female health, hygiene and nutrition.
Yuwa has also been actively working on livelihood aspects of the players through both micro lending and micro enterprise. In its first micro lending initiative, it gave out loans for electric irrigation pumps to players’ mothers. Though the social impact was impressive as the farmers could carry back the pumps home in the evening saving them the trouble of sleeping in open fields and malaria bites apart from the monetary saving of US$ 200 in diesel fuel in a single season, the loan recovery proved to be an arduous task. Built on the lessons of the micro-lending model, Yuwa came up with a new microenterprise initiative that would be directly beneficial to the players. This small scale, high return venture is generating operating income for Yuwa clubs and providing players with opportunities to start their own enterprises and invest in their education, health and future livelihood. The first venture under this initiative is producing, marketing and selling mushrooms which requires little time, training and investment but has high RoI. Meena Kumari, 14, is one of the first players to have become a mushroom entrepreneur. Her father, a cook, was shot dead by robbers. There are other success stories like that of Sita Kumari , 14, of village Hutup, who works in her father’s vegetable patch in mornings, attends school in the day and then is at Yuwa in the evening to perfect her shots. She has made it to the final selection team of the Sports Authority of India and is aiming for a place in the state team, for that would mean an escape from an early marriage. Suman Toppo, 11, also from Hutup, has worked as a catalyst in changing the mindset of her parents—a daily wager mother and a farmer father. She won a 75 per cent scholarship to school and paved the way for her sisters’ education as her parents decided to fund it from their meager income. It is curtsey to Yuwa that Suman and her sisters have a new life today. The girls too have a hard life helping their parents and balancing school and Yuwa training, but have no complaints.
This hardship is what has led seven girls from the programme to become coaches, earning on an average 50 per cent of their parents’ income, working for two hours per day, 4–5 days per week. Yuwa coaches gain confidence, leadership and professional skills that make them employable. Players also learn budgeting and savings skills through system of purchasing subsidised football equipment. The team behind Yuwa India’s success comprises three board members, Gastler as director and co-founder, a programme coordinator from the US, a female mentor from Jharkhand, nine coaches who are girls and boys who've come up through Yuwa, and volunteers from Spain and the US. The funding though has been much of a promise in the pipeline and Yuwa has managed most of it on its own. Yuwa has also raised US$ 92,000 from investors. Gastler says, “For the first two years we founders funded Yuwa almost entirely from our own pockets. Then in 2011 we were the first in India to win Nike Gamechangers.” The US$ 25,000 NKE grant was used to build a classroom and is being used for building a sports facility. The award proved to be a real gamechanger for Yuwa bringing it visibility. “It also gave us some exposure internationally and in India. Unlike most NGOs, we don’t have an office in a city and we don’t have any paid staff fundraising, so most of our funds have come from volunteers who have worked with us and then made donations and become advocates for Yuwa,” adds Gastler.
With fame came the promises. “We were offered ten acres of land by the Jharkhand government during presidential rule last year, but that stalled as soon as a government was elected,” the coach says with a smile. The promises were renewed following the media blitzkrieg upon Yuwa girls’ return from Spain with a bronze medal. “They received loads of support from the media, with hour-long specials on Bharka Dutt (NDTV) and Arnab Goswami (Times Now) shows and full-page and front page articles in national newspapers and magazines. At that point, the Jharkhand government offered five acres—half the original offer—to build a small residential centre.” The offer has again been stalled, he says. With the vision to put every girl’s future in her own hands, the founder says “I think our team has done an exceptional job of building a programme that has done just that. We've allowed the girls to decide what they want from Yuwa, and one thing they wanted was to come, play and study every day. So while most NGOs that work with kids once a week or once a month, we see ours three hundred plus days per year. Each girl in Yuwa gets over a thousand hours of programme each year.” In 2014, Yuwa plans to use technology to give girls access to quality education, and to bring more and more passionate staff and volunteers onto its team. The organisation hopes to build a centre of excellence that will give girls from poor families the chance to get world-class education and coaching. A centre which can accommodate upto 1,000 children is under construction. Gastler is confident, “If a lot of these girls had the opportunities I’ve had, they’d be applying to Ivy League colleges instead of trying to avoid getting married off at age 16. I know we can make those opportunities available to them at a low-cost by being a little innovative. Any doubt you have will disappear if you watch 13-year-old Kusum's TEDx talk on Youtube.”
Yuwa is also expanding with others wanting to replicate its success. A group of IIM Udaipur students have started their own programme based on the model. “Each of our young female coaches from villages in Jharkhand stayed in Mumbai's Dharavi slum for months at a time to start a programme for girls there, that's now being continued by our friends at Reality Gives, a Mumbai-based NGO,” Gastler informs. Though Gastler admits, “I miss a lot of things from home,” he is “in this for the longhaul.” He is enjoying being here, building the programme, and “bringing together a good team of people to take Yuwa another step forward.” We wish many such yuwas would come forward to take that step further.