Youth Venture

We are using football to create awareness around education.

We arefrom a community which gives education the least importance. The friends that we have grown up with left studies after they failed in fourth grade or fifth grade. They started earning and would get a good salary home. They were satisfied with that. Half of the salary they would give home and other half they would keep for themselves. They started smoking, drinking, playing bets. I tried to take them off a lot but they would not listen to me. When their family came to know that they thought to marry them off. They thought marriage would make them serious. So they married at 18-19 year of age. Today one of them is 22 and has two kids. But they still drink and smoke. When we saw some drop outs from my community, lazing around, we thought they would too go the same ways like our friends had gone. And so we resolved to do something for them when they were still very young. And so we talked to a dozen of them and asked if they wanted to learn football. Of course they wanted to. Once they were hooked, we introduced layers of education and other activities.