The Youth Sprts Programme run by the international...

The Youth Sprts Programme run by the international NGO, Carolina for Kibera. As a major part of the program, football tournaments are held regularly. The program helps bring together boys and girls from different ethnicities at a young age to promote community cooperation and development. Each team must be ethnically diverse to compete. The program is also the only sponsor of an all-girls football tounrament in Kibera. Kibera, at the very heart of Nairobi City, is the second largest slum in Africa, second only to Soweto in South Africa. It is made up of 11 so-called villages or districts and is about 1 million strong. The slum makes up about a quarter of Nairobi's population and sits uncomfortably next to the Nairobi business sprawl on the edge of the CBD. It was the centre of a lot of the violence that inflicted Kenya following the disputed election results in December 2007, when the predominantly Luo population in the slum, who are ardent supporters of the then Opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), were a big source of the mayhem that the elections instigated. There are many charities and foundations that work in Kibera. On many occassions I travelled into Kibera to follow the work of one such international charity called Carolina for Kibera, winner of the 'Hero of Global Health' Award as voted by Time Magazine and the Bill Gates Foundation in 2005. The NGO aims to fight abject poverty and introduce health improvement programmes while also preventing violence and bringing together communities that have been torn apart by the ethnic violence that followed the disputed elections through community-based development. The focus is mainly two-fold. There is a Youth Sports Program which aims to promote youth leadership and ethnic and gender co-operation in Kibera by bringing young members of the community together through sports, mainly football. And there is the Tabitha Clinic which is run by Carolina. This is again a community-based initiative a