Premier Skills launches in Malawi

The Premier League's leading international grassroots project Premier Skills this week launches in Malawi.


The Malawi course follows a number of other successful Premier Skills projects that are taking place across the African continent.

Premier Skills, run in partnership with the British Council, is an innovative coaching project that will not only help develop the coaching skills of around 40 young Malawian coaches, including 12 women, but will also teach them to use football as a tool for skills and community development.

AFRICAN COUNTRY
The project, which includes support from local partners, will also work to develop the coaches' English language ability.

The one week Premier Skills course, to be run in the city of Blantyre, is being led by former Wimbledon and Jamaica international footballer Robbie Earle.

He will be joined by Mike Dixon and Jonathan Garside, community coaches from Manchester City and Everton respectively. All of the coaches involved in Premier Skills are UEFA and English FA qualified coaches.

For the Premier League, Premier Skills represents its flagship international development programme. The Malawi project represents the seventh African country to host Premier Skills after previous projects in Botswana, Egypt (in Alexandria and Cairo), Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia and Uganda.

ROLLED OUT
Follow-up evaluation has found that 19 of the original participants in Egypt have already secured jobs delivering community football coaching as a result of the training that they received on Premier Skills.

With this successful model now in place, a number of projects will be rolled out across Africa, India, China and South East Asia between now and 2010. The overall aim is to train 1,000 coaches, who will go to impact upon the lives of a further 100,000 people.

Premier Skills projects are always run in conjunction with local partners and in Malawi it will be supported by the Football Association of Malawi (FAM), along with Supersport, the Premier League's broadcast partner in Sub-Saharan Africa.

As part of the training component of the course, participants will be able to develop their English language skills and subsequently build upon these using the suite of Premier Skills multi-media English language materials. These include a dedicated Premier Skills website, www.britishcouncil.org/premierskills, which features an online community space for participants.

YOUTH LEADERS
Premier League Chief Executive, Richard Scudamore said: "At home the Premier League and our Clubs have a long-held commitment and reputation for investing in community and education programmes. Given our popularity and success internationally we felt it only right to take this approach to a wider community.

"The Premier League is becoming increasingly popular in Africa and it is important we use our profile and reach to encourage and engage communities - the roll-out of Premier Skills projects will do just that. Our partnership with the British Council, using top coaches like Robbie Earle, will help develop the skills of local youth leaders for the long term benefit of their local communities."

British Council Chair, Lord Kinnock, said: "This is a truly exciting, creative initiative. Football transcends race and language among people everywhere. By putting the British Council's experience and global network together with the Premier League's great know-how, we can reach countless young people and help to enhance their skills on the pitch, their self-development, and their understanding of other cultures."

Walter Nyamilandu Manda of the Football Association of Malawi said: "We need to enhance the skills of our coaches who act as our intermediaries in the communities they live in. It is from these communities that great skills are born, nurtured and perfected before the whole world sets its eyes on. There is no better way of doing this by partnering with Premier League, 'the Home of Football', together with the British Council.

"Football development is an on-going process of learning. You learn to teach, you learn to share, you learn to improve, you learn so that others may also learn from you and that is the key to it."