Girls in the Lead
Why We Started
We started Girls in the Lead because some of the best women's sports organizations in the world were doing remarkable work in their own communities - and had almost no way to share what they knew with each other or with the wider field. Decades of hard-won learning about program design, impact measurement, safeguarding, and community organizing were locked inside individual organizations. We wanted to change that.
The problem wasn't a shortage of good programs. It was that the people running them - in Berlin, in Cape Town, in Kilifi, in Delhi - were each solving the same problems from scratch, without the tools, connections, or platforms to build on each other's work. Meanwhile, a new generation of sports-for-development leaders needed practical training in how to design programs for girls and women, how to measure impact rigorously, and how to grow and sustain their organizations. We saw a gap between what the field knew collectively and what individual organizations could access, and we decided to close it.
What We Do
We run a range of activities including:
-
Facilitated workshops and sessions focused on leadership, confidence, communication, and teamwork
-
Sport-based activities used as a tool to build resilience, participation, and self-belief
-
Group exercises and discussions encouraging reflection and peer learning
-
Leadership challenges and practical tasks designed to build confidence through action
-
Partnerships with schools, NGOs, and community organizations to embed programs within existing structures
-
Training and support for facilitators, enabling the model to be delivered consistently across different settings
Our Partners
What We Built
We brought together some of the leading organizations working at the intersection of sport, gender, and social change - Boxgirls South Africa in Cape Town, Moving the Goalpost in Kenya, NAZ Foundation in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, Seitenwechsel in Berlin (fighting discrimination and promoting LGBTQ+ rights in sport since 1988), the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Maharashtra, and the Sport for Social Change Network Africa in Pretoria, a network operating across 13 African countries. Together we built a shared platform to make our collective knowledge available to a much wider community of practice, with funding support from the Swedish Postcode Foundation.
What Came Out Of It
Our community has grown to reach thousands of girls and women across the network, with hundreds of practitioners participating in our training and workshops. What started as a platform for knowledge exchange has become a real community of practice - organizations in India, Germany, Kenya, and South Africa learning from and with each other in ways that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
Recognition
Girls in the Lead operates as part of Camp Group's broader work on gender, sport, and social change. Our webinars have been covered by sportanddev.org, the leading international platform for sport-for-development practitioners, and co-hosted with Yunus Sports Hub. The initiative reflects a conviction we share with organizations like Women Win and the UN Office on Sport for Development and Peace - that sustainable change in this field depends on the strength of the organizations and the people doing the work, not just the programs they run.