‘We want to be champions!’ Academy trains Cameroon’s next generation of women footballers

On a rugged, gravelly patch of earth in Elig Edzoa, a working-class district of Yaounde, 14-year-old Leslie starts performing skills – juggling the ball with her foot, soon attracting a crowd of kids. They’re soon playing the toro passing game. 

It was right here in this part of Yaounde – nicknamed Rails because of the tracks crossing it – that former Cameroon star Gaëlle Enganamouit set up the country’s first women’s football academy. And it’s there that Leslie’s skills have gone from strength to strength. 

“I was born and raised at the Rails; I started playing football on those streets,” Enganamouit said on the phone. “Every time I go back to Cameroon, I go back to the old neighbourhood; I had to give something back to my young sisters. The academy also shows that it’s not a bad neighborhood – that good things happen there.” 

Leslie is one of many flourishing talents who joined the academy. She goes to training twice a week – but that doesn’t stop her playing football in her spare time, using every opportunity she can get to hone her skills. “I’m always ready to play – just like that,” she said, adding that she prefers to wear football outfits than to dress  “like a girl”. 

“Even when she was little, you could see she preferred footballs to dolls,” said Leslie’s father Jacques Manyo Bayard, pointing to two stones near the school that kids still use as goalposts. 

Leslie is naturally a bit shy, but she lights up when playing at the Rails Football Academy grounds – a bumpy rectangle, with shops on one side, the rail tracks on the other, and no sidelines or nets in the goals. It’s difficult terrain to play on – but one where Enganamouit herself flourished. 

“The thing about Africa is you’re playing on difficult terrain –