FOOTBALL4GOOD MAGAZINE | MARCH 2020

Perched either side of the border where Uganda and Kenya collide, lie two dusty towns both going by the name of Busia. For young women, however, the tales that straddle the one-stop-border-post paint two very different realities.On the Ugandan side, there lies a teenage pregnancy crisis as rife as it is entrenched as a social taboo. To challenge the stigma both marginalis- ing and endangering young mothers, local football-based grassroots organisation Youth Environment Service (YES) has turned to an uncommon solution – football. Dorcas remembers her pregnancy as a time of isolation. For months, she locked herself away at home, worrying about what she would do with herself and ‘the baby’. News of the life inside her could not prevent her from feeling utterly alone. The uncertainty left her unable to deal with her emotions; her outlook on the future became clouded by fear. “I had seen many girls drop out of school, or be denied by their parents and then becoming homeless,” she says. “I’d heard of girls having serious operations while giving birth and losing their lives during the delivery.” At the time, Dorcas was only sixteen years old. Unlike the daily flux of vehicles crossing this commercial gateway in their thousands, for Busia’s young women some things remain unmoved – their lack of access to universal reproductive health and rights services. “I still don’t know who the father is,” Dorcas says, as she explains that her mother owns a bar and that “during that period there were a lot of men coming and going.” “I was simply having fun in an environment where people were having casual sex,” she says, unaware then of the potential ramifications. At school, news of her pregnancy soon spread and she quickly became the victim of abuse from fellow students. Afraid to attend, she too dropped out, overwhelmed by a constant feeling of sadness. “I felt useless and like a burden to my own mother,” she says after admitting she spent most of her time crying. One day, there was a knock on her front door. It was a football coach from local organisa- tion YES, encouraging her to join a session for expecting mothers. YES makes use of football’s omnipresence in Uganda, to educate young people where, through absenteeism, the staid classroom set- ting alone is failing. By combining traditional learning with football, YES are able to inform on topics ranging from environmental issues, health and hygiene, self-empowerment and teenage pregnancy. While key to progress, in Uganda sex edu- cation is deemed controversial. On aver- age, women in Uganda have five children. A quarter of these women have their first child before the age of 19 and only think about con- traception after having a second child. Because of societal constraints, as Dorcas explains, “I didn’t have any of the information I have now or even the sense of self-empow- erment to feel abstinence from sex was an option.” 18 19 FOOTBALL4GOODMAGAZINE | MARCH2020 FOOTBALL4GOOD&PHOTOGRAPHY