A sport with a bad name
Pool has a bad reputation in Kenyan culture. People link it to idlers, to miraa and muguka chewers, and to young men “with no future”. We have seen police use force on harmless young people who were just having fun.
That is why you find pool tables in dim mabati sheds at the edge of the village and not in proper, well-run spaces. The stigma pushes the game into the dark, and the dark is where drugs and alcohol are.
Town youth have options. Village youth do not.
A young person in the city can pick from dozens of pastimes. In the village the list is short: football, and pool. There are no basketball, tennis or squash courts. The few swimming pools are too expensive. There is nowhere to play indoor games like scrabble, table tennis or draughts.
We tell young people to stay away from drugs and alcohol, then take away the one thing they do after work. The question always comes back: what do you want these young people to do? Where do you want them to go?
The game is bigger than its reputation
Next door, pool has made multi-millionaires in Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. At home, SportPesa has sponsored a countrywide pool tournament. Serious backers are starting to treat the game as a sport, and the young people who play it as athletes.
What a tournament really does
Our tournaments in Illasit and Loitokitok are not just small events in the village. Each one is a networking event. A young person who usually sits in a dark corner gets to meet people from every walk of life, just by playing or watching.
We have seen players win prize money and close deals. We have seen them sit down with older and influential people in the community who had always felt out of reach. And slowly, the harmony begins. A young person makes a new friend, finds a community, spots a business opportunity, finds out they have real talent, and starts to question where their life is going.
Where this is going
One of the biggest goals of Digital Moran CBO is to build youth spaces in the village. These will be places where young people can thrive, escape drugs and alcohol, and think about their futures calmly and positively. The tournaments build the community and the case for that space. With partners, we can build it.