‘They need role models’ – how football is changing young girls’ lives in Nepal

Welcome to Moving the Goalposts, the Guardian’s free women’s football newsletter. Here’s an extract from this week’s edition. To receive the full version once a week, just pop your email in below:

On 19 September, more than 15,700 people flocked into Kathmandu’s Dasharath Rangasala to watch Nepal in the final of the 2022 SAFF Women’s Championship. The hosts of the South Asian Football Federation tournament ultimately lost to Bangladesh but, more importantly, it signified a changing of the tide both in the progress of the national team but also the wider relationship between women and football.

In Nepal the barriers for girls to participate in sport, let alone football, are considerable. For the majority, their role from an early age is to take care of their family and marry.

Sarah Van Vooren is well placed to understand these issues. Alongside Mashreeb Aryal she founded Atoot to provide an “empowering space” for girls in the Kapilvastu district on the southern border with India. Kapilvastu contains a diverse population and has one of the highest rates of child marriage in Nepal. Atoot uses football as a tool to teach and enfranchise girls in the region, alongside education classes and life-skills workshops.

“We are not here to make the best footballers,” says Van Vooren. “Our programme is literally a safe space; and the football ground is the safest space for these girls. What we conduct on the football ground starts as drills. But we incorporate so much more into it … There’s so many things they don’t learn until these daily sessions. Then it becomes ingrained within their psyche. We also do community engagement every day as that is the most important aspect. You need to engage the community in your work and why you