Photo: Breakthrough Chiparamba girls football team, 20 July, 2011, Olympic Youth Development Center, Lusaka, Zambia. Courtesy of Hikabwa Chipande.
Training and Developing Coaches in Southern Africa: Licensing and Administration
Guest Post by Hikabwa Decius Chipande (@HikabwaChipande)
Football is the most popular sport in southern Africa but there are few qualified coaches at all levels. Prior to 2010 most top league clubs in southern Africa were coached by people without even a basic qualification.
One major problem is that Southern African countries have a haphazard approach to coach education. What had been happening until recently was that any person could come to the region, conduct a coaching course for a few days, and declare the participants as coaches with questionable certificates of limited value. It has been, therefore, very difficult to know the actual capabilities of local coaches and their qualifications because there had been no set benchmarks. South Africa is an exception in that it has the South African Qualification Authority (SAQA), although its effectiveness remains debatable.
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