The Backroom Staff - Director: Itcan Mpithi

Director: Itcan Mpithi

Using football to build opportunity and community in Malawi

Itcan Mpithi is the founder of Reach Out for Life, a grassroots nonprofit near Blantyre, Malawi that supports children and youth through education, healthcare, food programs, sports, and vocational training.

Having founded the organization while still in school himself, Itcan has spent the past decade building opportunities for others to achieve their potential. He’s constantly expanding and innovating to offer new programs for children and youth in his community. Since 2014, Reach Out for Life has supported well over 1,000 young people.

Itcan’s story and efforts to use football to foster belonging, community and develop pathways for young players to follow their dreams, is a reminder that football can be more than ‘just a game’.

NB: This was an extra special interview, as Itcan was one of the winners of The Backroom Staff’s microgrant program last month. It was great to catch up and hear about the progress he’s already made in establishing a football team!

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity. 

Read on thebackroomstaff.com 

[ Background ]

My background is quite simple. My parents were working at an orphanage in Lunzu, part of Blantyre. When my dad died, we remained there and I spent most of my childhood there and grew up there.

There was a sports project that I was part of and I loved playing football. But to be honest, the inspiration to grow and be ‘big’ was never in me. I think I only learned later that there was a Premier League with big teams and big players out there - we were just playing for fun.

Later on, when I was in college, I began working on Reach Out for Life. We founded it just after I started college. We started with early childhood development and added more and more things, especially around mental health and sexual health.

[ Why did you start Reach Out for Life? Where did the idea or inspiration come from? ]

One time, when I was in secondary school, I was withdrawn from school due to having the wrong school uniform and shoes. I visited my uncle to talk to him about it and I found that his daughters had so many school shoes! There were many shoes that were not being used. When I saw that, I asked him if I could take them and share them with my friends back home. My cousins told their friends and that’s where it started. We started distributing them so our classmates didn’t have to face the same thing I did.

We were in a community where there were no options for early childhood development and where the government schools were very far away. This meant that a lot of youths in the community had a big gap between their age and their ‘school age’. Imagine a 16-year-old boy or girl in Standard 5 - which is the primary school level - it was embarrassing for them to go to school. So, many dropped out entirely.

This was our initial motivation to start an early childhood program, so at least children can start primary school at an early age and have a chance to achieve something by the end of their school time. So, that’s where we started and we’ve grown over time to where we are now. Currently, we have a team of 10 working on several projects.

[ How many children or youths are involved in at least one of your programs? ]

Right now, in the childhood development programs, we have 100 kids from 2 years old to 5 years old and in the youth programs, we have 60 youths. In the youth programs, we usually work with kids from 8 to 20 years old but we also have some unique situations where we might have 2 or 3 who are a couple years older.

[ Who are the kids who are coming to Reach Out for Life? ]

When we started the early childhood development project, our biggest focus was on children who were orphans and often staying with their grandmothers, or maybe their siblings. Now, we’ve also included those who are coming from vulnerable backgrounds - often families that are getting less than $2 US dollars a day.

We’ve started offering feeding programs - right now, we only provide breakfast due to limited resources, but we intend to grow and provide more meals soon. We know the majority of these children, the first meal they get is at our center. Earlier this year, we did some home visits to see how we can best work with children and found that some of the children are only eating at our center. We want to provide after-school support.

I’ve been trying to find resources so that we can at least provide maize flour, which is a staple food, or rice, or cooking oil. That hasn't materialized yet, but we're trying to see how we can best provide so that the children get the most out of it.

We started working with the youths already in our community, but we’ve grown and now do some things with 5 villages nearby. That way, we can offer more things and educate more people. Through this, we’ve had different people join our community from different backgrounds. For example, we had the opportunity to start afternoon classes for young mothers who dropped out but want to continue their schooling.

So, that’s how we have been thinking about it. Over time, when we have new situations, new opportunities, we learn about it and see what is the best way we can go to offer something helpful.

[ How far away are people coming to your center? ]

I think on average, about 5 kilometers. Some are coming from a little further, maybe 7 or more kilometers and some are coming from closer but on average, I’d say 5 kilometers.

[ How are you funded? Is there any support from the local government or bigger NGOs? ]

Funding has been one of the biggest challenges I've ever faced. I think being able to share our work throughout the world, so that we can get more funding has been a challenge. But, luckily, we've been working with Dr. Elder from Australia, who also introduced us to the Zoe Medical Foundation, who we’re currently working with.

Currently, we work with not more than 2,000,000 Malawian Kwacha - which is around (USD) $1,000 or 1,200 - a month. We try to budget this for providing food, managing the youth programs and supporting our volunteers and this keeps us moving.

So, yeah, that’s the challenge we’re trying to navigate.

—^interviewer’s note: to emphasize how efficient Reach Out for Life is: 2 million MWK (~€990) a month supports over 160 children and youths!

[ Can you talk about your idea to start a football team, or a sports program more broadly? ]

We saw that some, especially the older youths, were dropping out due to other community factors or other reasons. We thought about how we can make sure we don’t ‘lose’ this vibrant youth and decided to try and start a sports project in the hope of bringing some of them back.

We started slowly about a year ago. We don't have enough space to have sporting activities and we didn’t have equipment. We tried to partner with some organizations to help us with equipment but we didn’t get the breakthrough we needed.

Our goal is to create opportunities for our youth through sports. I want to create a working system.

Throughout my childhood and youth, when I was playing football, we had some really good, promising players. I know that these people, if they had gotten an opportunity, they would be somewhere big. I want to create a program with trained coaches, a system where we can recruit players for our team and connect with people who can push them forward, while also using it as a place and opportunity for them to learn, go back to school and continue their education.

[ Is it possible to create some kind of connection - and ultimately, a pathway - to the professional football clubs around you? ]

Yes, there's a football club that is playing just 2 or 3 kilometers from our center. It’s still in the early stage, but we want to identify at least a group of players we can recommend to them. We’ve also spoken with the Football Association of Malawi, so that we can register our team and so that we can register a competitive league.

Now, we’re prioritizing the first steps - getting a trainer for our team with the knowledge and expertise for our kids and having a proper ground for the kids. Then we can move to the other stages and perhaps, if we create a partnership with another club, some of our players can penetrate their team.

[ How do you see the potential of football in Malawi? ]

I still play football socially, just with my friends on weekends and time and time again, when we go outside our community to play soccer, I see a lot of talented players. But they don’t have the opportunity to play or try their luck beyond their current level at the regional or national level.

But also, if we look at the performance of our country, as a national team, it’s been poor for a long time. I think we are above 120 in the FIFA ranking.

We know the problem is the foundation, the infrastructure, for players and teams. In our community, for example, there are no under-20 leagues. We want to create a tournament so that these kids can compete and hopefully give some exposure to the talented players and give them another opportunity, another option so that skilled players to at least try and realize their dreams - it’s one thing to try and it not to work out, but not even trying is something an option we want to remove.

My dream is to create a system where, through our teams, we can recruit young ones, train them with a trained coach, support them and give them a chance to compete. We (my generation) never had that chance, but we want to create it for someone else.

[ Looking forward, in say, 5 years’ time, what would success look like for this project? ]

Success in 5 years would involve us creating a good football academy. If we can help produce good football players who can play at a higher level, have a standard pitch where all the players can train and can create an under-20 tournament with many teams aligning to join, that would be a success.

If we can produce at least 10 or 20 good footballers, that would be really amazing.

[ What other, perhaps non-football, projects are you planning for the future? ]

We’re starting a biomechanical project and have already done a needs assessment and have begun mobilizing resources to procure working tools and build a workshop. In the government health centers in Blantyre, there are a lot of ongoing projects related to healthcare - from malaria to donating medical equipment - but there’s often no one who comes and repairs things.

So, the government has a lot of broken equipment and doesn’t provide funding for procuring spare parts. If we can come in and help repair some of this equipment, it will be one of our most important and vital projects.

We were supposed to start earlier this month, but one of our donors pulled out and it affected our planning a bit. We’re doing some fundraising to be able to start the project soon.

We also want to grow our children's center to have the standard A1 - from grade 1 to grade 5 - so that more children who are studying with us can stay up to grade 5 and then go to government schools. We spoke with the government and they said no, we still need to build out more infrastructure to be able to run full classes. That’s a challenge we’re working on.

And, we are currently constructing a kitchen and a proper dining area for our children, it’s almost done and will be really helpful.

These are some of the big projects that we're trying to find funding for and finish so we can move forward.

[ You started this project very early in your life and have been working on it for over a decade now. Why has this been so important to you, to dedicate your life to this kind of work? ]

Well, when it comes to opportunity, I think, to me, as an individual, I always feel bad when I see potential that isn’t given a chance to show it. Especially when it’s youths and young people in a developing world where every opportunity is a struggle and a lot of people are fighting for opportunities.

Creating a friendly environment where youths can show what they are, what they have and where they can be competitive in life. Creating this platform whereby we can uplift others to be who they want to be is something I find fulfilling.

I want to create that visibility so they can dream and learn and see that they can do it. I believe the youths who are moving along before us shouldn’t face the same challenges.

I’m constantly inspired by the youths too. Just recently, during one of our training sessions, some of the players were imitating Paul Pogba’s style. I was like, ‘when did you see this?’ When I was 12 or 13, I didn’t know anything like this! They told me they go to the market and watch football games sometimes. This inspired me, when we get solar power - because we don’t have any electricity in our community - maybe we’ll be able to set up something so more people can also watch games.

[ How can people support your work? ]

We currently accept (monetary) donations through our partners because it’s not possible to create a GoFundMe in our country, so we are using a donation link through our Australian partner.

Non-monetary support can range from donation of sports equipment to school resources, sewing machines, computers, children's clothes, toys, and musical instruments. Volunteers with sports skills (coaching, management, recruitment, etc.), ICT (software/website development, graphic design, etc.), teachers, etc.

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