by Agnes Amondi

Confederation of African Football, CAF released its objectives for the development of women’s football in Africa, one of five pillars in its new strategy to grow the sport across the continent.

Its vision for development contains three agendas. These are: accelerating the growth of the women’s game at all levels, providing increased and improved training opportunities, and ensuring sustainable growth across all areas.

Additionally, it also provided its objectives for this development pillar. It includes: engaging with schools to participate in regular competitions, facilitating certified coaching education for women, and organising regular female referring education.

CAF also stated that these are just some of the objectives for achieving this pillar.

Establishment of continental club competitions

The inadequacy of competitions within women’s football in Africa or its lack thereof has also been a subject of simmering debate within circles of women’s football. There has been a lot of calls for the Confederation of African Football (CAF) to lead the way in terms of establishing continental club competitions and further strengthen national team competitions.

In its recently released five point plan to grow women’s football in Africa, CAF listed competitions as one of its five pillars in its strategy. It has now delved deeper in this particular agenda in which it has stated that it intend to upgrade the standards of competitions.

A part of its objectives are:

Enhancing the qualifying pathway for CAF Women’s Competitions

Working with CAF member associations to increase the number of national leagues at youth and senior level

Working diligently with the zonal unions to increase the number of Women’s Competitions for clubs and national teams at youth and senior levels

For the implementation of these objectives, CAF will initiate the following actions:

Review the competition’s regulations to incentivize participation

Introduce new Continental Club Competition to strengthen domestic leagues and clubs,

Organize the CAF Youth Championship to increase the motivation of players, coaches, and member associations