When Play it Forward Zambia’s girls reached the World Cup, it would have been easy to tell a story about football. But football was never the whole story. The real story is what it takes for a young person to thrive.
There is something undeniably powerful about football. It captures imaginations, creates heroes and gives young people the chance to dream beyond the boundaries of their everyday lives. Across the world this summer, millions of people are watching the World Cup, celebrating moments of brilliance that are years in the making and wondering what it takes to reach that stage.
For our partners at Play it Forward Zambia, those dreams have become reality. Three of their Girls’ under-17’s have reached the World Cup, while their Senior Boys’ team have just qualified to play in the Zambian National League! These are extraordinary achievements for any football academy, let alone one working in communities where opportunities are often limited and where many families are navigating poverty alongside repeated social and economic crises.
It would be easy to assume that this is a story about football because football is the part we see. We see the matches, the trophies, the team photographs and the young people proudly pulling on their shirts, and it is entirely natural to celebrate those visible moments of success. Yet over the past year, as we have worked alongside the Play it Forward team and had the pleasure of spending time with co-leads Rebecca Banda and O’Brian Ntebeka at our Community Building Summit in Nairobi, we found ourselves having surprisingly few conversations about football.
Instead, Rebecca spoke about food. She spoke about school books, parents, belonging and courage. She spoke about what it means for a young person to know that someone believes in them. Gradually, we realised that football had never really been the story at all.
“Sometimes we put all our emphasis on the big funding,” Rebecca reflected. “But that’s not necessarily where the impact and transformation lives. When you put in place all the support that enables one individual to meet their potential, that’s where the impact is.”
That simple shift in perspective changes everything. Instead of asking what programmes change lives, Rebecca begins with a different question altogether: what does this young person need in order to thrive?
Recently, the flexibility of One World Together’s Solidarity Fund enabled Play it Forward to support two young people with disabilities into boarding school after they had become isolated within their families. Rebecca explained that, while education was important, the impact reached much deeper than that.
“It’s more than helping people who have been isolated or rejected,” she reflected. “It’s also showing them that there is someone that loves you, someone that supports you, someone that is there for you.”
It was never just about football.
For Play it Forward, it has always been about creating the conditions in which young people can discover what they are capable of.
That philosophy explains why two of the programmes Rebecca spoke about most passionately are also among the least visible—and, sadly, the least funded. Every young person who joins Play it Forward receives a vulnerability assessment, helping the team understand the realities they face beyond the football pitch. For some, that means discovering that the meal provided at Play it Forward may be the only proper meal they eat that day. For others, it means recognising that something as simple as school materials has become the barrier preventing them from continuing their education.
Rebecca described nutrition and literacy as the hidden ingredients that allow everything else to work. Football, digital skills, livelihoods training, mental health support and safeguarding all matter enormously, but none of them can reach their full potential if a young person is hungry, unable to stay in school or overwhelmed by circumstances beyond their control.
That is why unrestricted funding matters so much. It gives community organisations the freedom to respond to the realities they know best, investing not simply in programmes but in the countless acts of care that make those programmes possible. Sometimes that means a hot meal. Sometimes it means school books, counselling, emergency support or an opportunity that no project budget could ever have anticipated. It means trusting communities to know what their young people need most.
The same philosophy extends far beyond individual young people. Play it Forward works closely with parents because they know that young people thrive when the adults around them are thriving too. They continue supporting many young people into university, employment and internships, recognising that qualifications alone do not always translate into opportunity. Some return to Play it Forward as coaches and staff members themselves, creating a remarkable cycle in which those who were once supported become the people supporting the next generation.
Again and again, Rebecca returned to one word that seemed to sit beneath all of this: belonging.
“With this level of community engagement, the community feels like they belong and are actors themselves,” she told us. “They are not just poor people who need help. This is our change.”
Reflecting on the Summit afterwards, she returned to the importance of trust.
“This flexibility of funding gives you the control to implement the change with passion – the way you need to do it, with courage and not fear. We need to believe in ourselves all the time. We’ve seen the power of that here. Just be a part of the change, and that change will be implemented.”
When we first sat down to write this story, we thought we were writing about a football academy whose girls had reached the World Cup.
In the end, Play it Forward reminded us that it was never just about football.
It was always about everything it takes to help a young person, and the community around them, truly thrive.
At One World Together, we often say that we are trying to reimagine giving. Reading back through our conversations with Rebecca, it struck us that this is exactly what she has been inviting us to do all along. Instead of asking what our donations pay for, we now see that the better question is, what do they make possible?
Sometimes they make possible football coaching. Sometimes they make possible school books, a hot meal, counselling or an internship that opens the door to employment. More often than not, they make possible something much harder to measure but infinitely more important: the conditions in which a young person knows they are valued, communities recognise their own power, and organisations have the freedom to respond with courage rather than fear.
And our Solidarity Fund enables you to be part of that. Every donation helps make possible thousands of these acts of care, coming together one after another until they become a young person’s future.
That’s solidarity in action.
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