Breaking barriers: How Fatuma Adan turned football into a weapon for change

All Fatuma Abdulkadir Adan wanted, as a six-year-old, was to kick a ball in an open ground.

Introduced to the sport by her father, the lawyer yearned for the day she might play in an arena in front of cheering crowds and with no limitations.

Traditionally, girls in Marsabit were not allowed to play football, which was considered to be a man’s sport.

There was also a myth in the community that the exertion would rupture her hymen, thus destroying her all-important and sacred virginity and, still more important, marriageability.

Fatuma’s passion, however, kept growing. She held on to the belief that her dream was valid.

Eventually, at age 25 she kicked her first ball in an open field and kept at it until she played for a Kenyan team in the Global Goals World Cup in New York.

Believing football was one of the keys to changing the world, Fatuma returned home to found the Horn of Africa Development Initiative (Hodi).

The High Court advocate developed Hodi to use the beautiful game to fight discrimination against girls and women, including FGM and early marriage.

She also used it to quell ethnic violence among tribes.

So rigid were her community’s beliefs that residents pelted her with stones during a live match because she allowed girls to play football. She had to flee the pitch.

Fatuma was not deterred. She was willing to do anything to change the outcome for girls whose future often was decided and voided at a tender age.

Out of the 56 girls in her primary school, only seven of them made it to high school. The rest were married off. That realisation was illuminating; girls and women did not have a voice or a choice.

She threw herself into challenging culture, religion and patriarchal society in the only way she knew, by encouraging girls to play football and painstakingly encouraging pastoralist society to accept.

“I knew my place and initially I would only speak from behind the men, as I tried to buy their trust,” Fatuma tells the Star in an interview.

It took her 12 years to break her silence on issues such as FGM and even to talk about it in the mosque. 

“However, I kept going through patience, perseverance, and determination to never give up on myself and the girls,” she says. “Even when I was stoned in the field, I kept showing up. I kept telling myself my responsibility is to these girls. I was there, I pushed the barriers and the bars that were there literally.”

Thanks to her resilience, today many girls in Marsabit and elsewhere in Kenya and in Ethiopia are playing football. “It’s no longer an issue,” Fatuma says. Not everyone agrees.

Her solutions to problems were and are two-fold. On issues such as FGM, Fatuma engaged the cutters and through conversations, many ended up dropping the blade. 

So much has changed that the community that once stoned her now ranks her as a high elder.

Fatuma, who also founded Fatuma Abdullahi & Co, launched the Shoot to Score Not Kill campaign, in which residents turned in guns for a chance to play football.

“We started by providing legal aid desks and training paralegals in 2003,” she says.

In 2004, however, there were a lot of killings. This war led to the killing of around 100 women and children in a school in the Turbi massacre involving feuding clans on July 12, 2005.

Afterwards, elders held many meetings and talked to perpetrators but women, children and young people were not involved.

“I felt there was need to involve women, so I invited 60 women who had lost their husbands,” Fatuma says. “The idea was to show them it didn’t matter if you were Borana or Gabra, the pain and experience were the same.

“The unifying pain led them to unite to preach peace,” she says.

Her focus then shifted to the youth, who were the ones given guns to shoot rivals.

Introducing football to them was a way of removing guns from the equation.

“We were taking the guns, disarming them both mentally and physically and replacing them with a football,” Fatuma says.

She and her team involved boys and young men in peace campaigns, from planning to execution in Marsabit villages.

It was especially important to involve boys who had grown up in a fighting culture. The aim was to give them alternative livelihoods.

Fatuma says it took them five years to accept there was life and a worthwhile livelihood beyond cattle raids. Eventually, there was community buy-in and now more than 152 villages in the Horn of Kenya are on boardscr.

Her biggest win, however, is seeing young women and young men running Hodi, the Horn of Africa Development Initiative, which she founded.

“They took over when I pursued other things, but I gave them a good starting point and now they are running the race. I believe young people have to lead today and not tomorrow,” Fatuma says.

She has coupled these efforts with girls’ and young women’s empowerment and behavioral change. They are going for positions such as prefects and presidents in the North Eastern counties, which was unheard of not so long ago.

Girls’ confidence improved and they were able to take their self-esteem to the field, where they introduced mixed teams for football, and also girls and boys competing against each other.

They are, however, careful not to have any physical contact, as it is forbidden by Islam and they only focus on no-touch football.

Fatuma has won awards, including the Fifa Diversity Awards, the Commonwealth Points of Light Award and the Stuttgart Peace Prize.

Her biggest award is the resilience of pastoralist communities, where gender-based violence and discrimination against women has been rampant. Climate change impacts have led to loss of livestock, competition for water and pasture and violence often leading to death.

Some of these communities are changing the way they deal with these issues and now are giving women and girls a chance to be part of solutions to problems that affect everyone.

She challenges everyone to follow their dreams, saying, “It is only you who can make them come true.”