By Iminza Keboge
Published November 21, 2021
Confederation of African Football (CAF), the body that governs football matters across Africa, is in March 2022 set to to begin an intercontinental schools football tournament for boys and girls.
CAF says the initiative, called CAF Pan-African Schools Football Championship,is ‘a grassroots effort to use the lessons of football to guide growth and development and shape future leaders’.
“The best investment we can make to ensure that African football is among the best in the world and self-sustaining, is to invest in schools’ football and youth football development infrastructure for boys and girls,” says Patrice Motsepe, the current President of CAF.
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The CAF Pan-African Schools Football Championship will be divided into three levels, starting with its first leg; the National School Football Championship to be held in June and August 2022. In this, each CAF Member association will organise a national competition with its school football teams. The finalist teams of the boys and girls national tournaments will then qualify for the Zonal tournament.
Each CAF Zone will then organise a Zonal School Football Championship to be held between September and December 2022. Finalists in this championships, and two boys and two girls schools teams will qualify to participate in the official and ultimate Pan-African School Football Championship to be kicked off in March 2023.
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“As our schools prepare our future leaders,” Véron Mosengo-Omba, the Secretary-General of CAF, says, “a continent-wide tournament will help instill football values like respect, discipline, teamwork and fair play into their hearts and minds.Football not only develops a child’s physical health but promotes a mental and social well-being that are vital to growth. We also hope that a pan-African football tournament will promote pan-African friends and keep children away from darker corners of society like criminality and drugs.”
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“If you want kids to go to school,”Mosengo-Omba says, “put football into schools. At CAF, we can’t stress enough the importance of education and sports. By putting the two together, we have a recipe for change. We look forward to bringing our young African leaders together through the Pan-African Football Championship.”
Cairo (Egypt)-based CAF, that brings all the 54 countries in Africa, was founded by Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, and South Africa in 1957
