Soccer, pool and nothing else: why we take the village pool table seriously

Ask a young person in Illasit, Kimana or Loitokitok what they do after a day of work, and the answer is almost always the same. Football or pool. That is the whole list.

There are no basketball courts, tennis courts or swimming pools within reach. There is no youth centre, no library open in the evening, no hall for table tennis or draughts. Football needs a pitch, a ball, daylight and twenty other people. Pool needs a table, a few coins and a friend. So when the sun goes down, pool is what is left.

A game with a bad name

In Kenya, pool has been demonised. Parents warn their children away from it. Elders see a young man holding a cue and see an idler. The tables end up in dim iron-sheet sheds at the edge of the trading centre, next to the bar, because nobody wants them anywhere else.

And then the stigma becomes true. When the only place to play is beside alcohol, in the dark, with nobody responsible watching, the game picks up the company it was accused of keeping. The problem was never the game. It was where we pushed it.

“We tell young people to stay away from drugs and alcohol, then take away the one thing they do after work. Where do we want them to go?”

Demystifying the game

Pool is a sport. It takes focus, patience, geometry, nerve and sportsmanship. Every match ends with a handshake. Around the world it is played professionally, televised and sponsored. There is nothing about a cue and fifteen balls that makes a young person bad.

Moran Pool Club exists to show that, in public. Our tournaments run in the open, with registration, seeds, rules and a referee. The bracket goes up on a big screen and every result is published on this website. Families, business owners and local leaders come and watch. People who would never have walked into a pool hall see the young men of their village competing with skill and respect.

How Digital Moran empowers rural youth

Moran Pool Club is an initiative of Digital Moran CBO, a community organisation in Kajiado South that has trained over 5,000 rural young people in digital skills, runs Moran Farms, and works across the region to give village youth the same chances town youth take for granted.

Pool is how we reach young people who would never walk into a training room. A tournament gets them in the door. Once they are there, they meet mentors, business owners and each other, and they find out what else Digital Moran can offer them: skills, work, and a community that takes them seriously.

Keeping young people busy, in sport

An idle afternoon is where most of the trouble starts. A tournament to train for, a ranking to climb and a club to belong to fill that afternoon with something worth doing. That is why we keep the calendar full, and why we want young people to see themselves as athletes, not loiterers.