The Ghana Football Association, through the GFA Foundation, will launch the novel Ghana Prisons Project on Friday, 24th May, 2024.
This Football for Development initiative aims to use the power of football to promote the wellbeing, reformation, rehabilitation and reintegration of inmates of Ghana’s prisons into society. This is what the GFA Foundation is undertaking by providing some prison facilities across the country with football equipment and logistics such as jerseys, footballs, goalkeepers gloves and sets of football hose. Other items to be presented to the prisons include whistles, caution cards and movable goalposts.
Most importantly, the GFA Foundation will facilitate coaching, refereeing and mentorship training programmes for inmates and officers in prison facilities.
The Foundation will also organize advocacy workshops to sensitize the public and the citizenry on the negative impact of discrimination and stigmatization of prisons and prisoners in line with the Foundation’s objective of using football and its outcomes to effect behavioural and social change.
The GFA Foundation is the social investment and sustainability management structure of the GFA with its broad goal being to improve lives and livelihoods of people and football communities.
This project is being undertaken in partnership with the Ghana Prisons Service which is the state institution mandated to contribute to the maintenance of internal security by maintaining an efficient, humane, and safe reformatory penal system operated within the laws of Ghana.
The project is expected to provide prisoners with regular physical activity, good health and positive outlook about life to replace the tendency to slip into boredom, disillusionment and loss of the zest for life.
This project is the first of its kind to be undertaken by a Football Association globally with the previous ones having been undertaken by football clubs and other Non-Governmental Organizations [NGOs] in other parts of the world.
