MYSA

A League of Their Own: The Forgotten Revolution of the MYSA

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In 1987, a football game changed the social architecture of one of Kenya’s oldest and poorest slums. It was not televised. It didn’t end with trophies. Yet it marked the beginning of a grassroots revolution whose scale and durability are difficult to exaggerate. What began as a small community football tournament in Nairobi’s Mathare Valley would evolve into the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA)—a youth-led movement that has transformed the lives of tens of thousands of young people through sport, civic education, and environmental action.

This is not just the story of a sports program. It is the story of how young people, most of them born into structural abandonment, learned to clean their communities, organize for themselves, represent Kenya abroad, and demand the right to dream.

1. The Geography of Dispossession: Mathare in the 1980s

The Mathare Valley is one of Nairobi’s oldest informal settlements. Originally settled in the colonial period as a quarry site for African laborers, it sprawled into a dense and underserved residential area with little infrastructure, poor sanitation, and limited government presence. By the 1980s, Mathare was a shorthand for urban decay—an archetype of Kenya’s failure to integrate the urban poor into national development.

Crime was high, unemployment was endemic, and schools were overstretched or inaccessible. In this context, youth engagement often meant survival. It is precisely here, in this hardened landscape, that MYSA took root.

2. The Accidental Founding of MYSA (1987)

The story of MYSA’s founding begins with a local football tournament organized with the support of Bob Munro, a Canadian environmentalist and development consultant who had been working in Nairobi. At the time, Munro was advising the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), whose headquarters were just a few kilometers from Mathare. Alarmed by the unsanitary conditions and the idleness of Mathare’s youth, Munro helped organize a football league that incentivized teams not only to play but to clean their neighborhoods.

The system was ingenious in its simplicity: teams earned points not just for goals or wins, but for the number of garbage bags they filled during clean-up efforts. The first league involved just 27 teams, but the response was explosive. As more young people joined, football became a vector for something much more radical: self-organization, peer leadership, and civic participation.

As documented on MYSA’s official site, this was the genesis of a new model—sports for development—long before the term became an NGO cliché (MYSA, 2010).

3. Environmentalism in Boots: The Garbage League

One of MYSA’s most important contributions has been in the area of urban environmental sanitation. The Mathare Valley Cleanup League was one of its earliest initiatives. Youth teams would conduct weekly cleanups, often clearing mounds of waste and unblocking open drains in exchange for points in their league rankings. In this way, MYSA built a civic consciousness among youth, rooted not in sermons or charity, but in action and collective responsibility.

The cleanup model was later replicated in other informal settlements across Nairobi and eventually adopted as a best-practice case study by UNEP and other global institutions.

4. Football as Gender Politics: Bringing Girls onto the Field

In a society where girls’ participation in sport was often discouraged or outright denied, MYSA broke ranks with prevailing cultural norms. By 1992, it had launched one of Kenya’s first organized girls’ football leagues, providing not just sporting opportunities but also access to leadership training, health education (especially around HIV/AIDS), and safe spaces for self-expression.

Girls like Judith Akoth, who later became national players, began their journey on dust-filled pitches in Mathare. MYSA’s model insisted that girls deserved not only to play, but to lead.

5. The Export: Mathare United and International Prestige

Perhaps the most visible symbol of MYSA’s success was the creation of Mathare United Football Club in 1994. The club was formed to provide a professional pathway for the best-performing youth players. It quickly ascended through the ranks of Kenyan football, eventually winning the Kenyan Premier League in 2008. Mathare United became the first top-flight Kenyan football club founded in a slum—run on democratic principles, with strong community representation, and deeply rooted in youth development.

In parallel, MYSA teams began participating in the Norway Cup, the largest international youth tournament in the world. MYSA youth teams won multiple editions of the tournament, and several players used the exposure to earn scholarships abroad or join professional clubs. These were kids who had never seen passports before, now traveling internationally as ambassadors of a slum that had learned to self-govern.

6. Education, Health, and Advocacy: Beyond the Pitch

From the late 1990s onward, MYSA expanded its programming to include peer education, sexual health workshops, photography clubs, conflict resolution, and leadership training. It opened libraries and media centers, developed a youth magazine, and ran a series of public speaking and journalism competitions.

The association became a quasi-institutional layer of governance in areas where the state was largely absent. In a real sense, MYSA functioned like a municipal government: collecting garbage, managing disputes, providing recreation, and mentoring the next generation.

It was, in development-speak, a textbook example of “social capital”—but in practice, it was a quiet insurgency of dignity in a place designed to suppress it.

7. International Recognition and Structural Tensions

MYSA’s innovative model earned it global recognition. It received:

  • The UNEP Global 500 Roll of Honour (1992)
  • The Prince Claus Award (2003)
  • Multiple nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize in the early 2000s
  • Endorsements from FIFA and Ashoka for innovation in “sport for development”

Yet, success brought new challenges. The organization began facing pressure from donors, tensions over professionalization, and internal debates about how to scale without compromising grassroots ownership. The NGOization of MYSA meant that it had to navigate donor expectations, bureaucracy, and the demands of sustaining credibility internationally while remaining useful locally.

8. Legacy and Unfinished Work

By 2010, MYSA had involved over 25,000 youth in over 1,600 teams, according to its own records (MYSA, 2010). It had become a global reference point in the sport-for-development movement, training organizations in Rwanda, Ghana, and even Brazil on how to replicate its model.

But more importantly, MYSA changed the internal grammar of youth identity in Mathare. Where once there was only gangster logic or religious retreat, there was now a third space: the pitch as a forum, the whistle as a tool of leadership, and the jersey as a uniform of resistance.

Its legacy is visible not just in trophies, but in lives extended, futures redirected, and communities reminded of their worth.

Conclusion

In a country where informal settlements are often zones of abandonment and charity fatigue, MYSA’s story offers a counter-narrative. It shows what happens when youth are not treated as threats or victims, but as partners in building their own futures. It is a story of innovation born not in boardrooms but on muddy fields, where a group of young Kenyans taught the world that even in the most unlikely conditions, organization is possible—and that justice, sometimes, begins with a ball.

References

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