In Jharkhand, India, around 700 hundred miles from New Delhi, hundreds of families are impoverished, living in a rural area. Many girls and women in India are discriminated against due to their gender. However, one soccer and school program is changing this. Yuwa, derived from the Indian word for youth, is the name of an organization in Jharkhand, India.
Yuwa was founded in 2009 by Franz Gastler with financial help from his high school buddies. Gastler had moved from Minnesota to Delhi, India, after seeing the gender disparity between boys and girls. “While girls work, boys play,” Gastler said during an interview with Real Sports. Gastler relocated to Jharkhand to become an English teacher, where he had a group of girls approach him. They asked him if he could teach them how to play. He agreed. After this encounter, Gastler felt determined to fulfill the girl’s wishes. In 2009, Yuwa had its first practice. The participants awoke at 4 a.m. to ride a bus to soccer practice, attend school, and complete homework in the evening by candlelight.
6 in 10 girls in Jharkhand are soon-to-be child brides. Most of them will end up in child marriage and abusive spouses. They might spend their lives hauling bricks or mixing cement just to have an alcoholic husband spend their earnings on drinking or gambling. But Rose Thompson, the Yuwa school’s education director, says, “Education is the key to breaking free of that.”
Today, the Yuwa school is India’s most prominent non-profit soccer organization and the only one in Jharkhand. Every day, the girls come eager to learn and keep control of their future.