Why We Started TAFA

Four years ago, we realized that there was an increase of chronic absenteeism at both St. Andrews secondary School and Loldia Primary School in Kasarani. The children who were most affected were boys. We tried to find out why this was so. Our findings revealed that most of absent boys were involved in illegal fishing in the nearby Lake Naivasha. But why would they go for fishing while their colleagues were in school? That was the biggest question of all. We eventually found out that most of them were deeply engaged in drugs abuse. When they would run out of drugs they had to find ways of getting more stock as fast as possible. The easiest way was going to fish, and to sell their catch to households in Kasarani to get money to buy drugs. Their thirst for drugs drove them out of school.

We had to find a way to curb this since it was becoming a deeply troubling situation both at school and in the village. We decided to seek ways to reduce this problem and protect the children who were yet to recruited into this drug-abusing group, and to protect them from their influence.

We looked at what brings most youth together in Kasarani, and we noted that most boys would fill the halls in Kasarani to watch English Premier League, and some of them would spend their afternoon at the sidelines of the school playing  grounds to watch a match. Immediately we realized that the best option was to build on this interest.

We immediately began to recruit boys to join and we named the team TAFA meaning Talanta (Swahili for Talent) Africa Football Academy, aiming to nurture these boys’ football talent while preaching the gospel of “No school no football.” We were not certain it would work until we started hearing of positive reports from the two schools. Since the four of us who founded TAFA were also teachers, we also saw the first hand evidence of success.

Being encouraged by the positive results we decided to unveil TAFA formally as “football on a mission.” It is from this point that we needed to find other ways to boost what football was doing, hence the introduction of other life transforming programs such as our education and mentorship programs, and establishing TAFA Community Centre as a place where the boys would spent most of their day when not in school or field. After TAFA’s original success with the boys in Kasarani, we have expanded all our programs to include the girls in our community as well.