People tend to forget it but it’s a fairly obvious fact. Just as we can’t have an educated people if we do not have good schools, universities, libraries, and museums, we can’t have successful athletes and a thriving sports world if we don’t have good sports academies and infrastructure. That’s true all over the world, but, in the case of Ghana, that’s even truer—namely in the case of football.

Yes, football creates avenues for constructive socialization, professional opportunities not only for players but also for the hundreds of thousands of individuals that are needed to keep a football infrastructure, and it also creates and feeds brands, value chains, sports-related tourism, and all sorts of other forms of value. 

In the case of Ghana, a nation of football lovers, football could translate into an endless value that would add to the national wealth and job creation.

However, the lack of a supporting and adequate football infrastructure in our country translates into a recurrent loss. We can’t see football creating value that can benefit all of us because we, as a society, are not making the necessary investment to make that become a reality. Instead, we just keep on seeing our national talents—and therefore our national football wealth—being exported, and at cheap rates, because we have been turning our backs on our athletes while they’re still here, thirsty for our attention and support.

Sure, that could be said about all fields of sports in Ghana (certainly all across Africa), but, since we are a football organization, this is the angle from which we are examining our reality. However, examining it alone isn’t enough, which is why Keerapa Active is taking action to change the landscape for football athletes around the country.

More than our love for football, we are moved by a passion for creating a culture of football infrastructure development that allows our amateur and aspiring professionals players to have easy and affordable access to professional-grade football structures. We want to allow them to prepare themselves to become the football stars that the country can support and look up to.

Keerapa active is seeking to create a football academy network in Ghana that does not become a monopoly—on the contrary, we want to build a network of football fields and facilities (which will also be open to athletes from other sports) that allow local, regional and national football clubs, groups and associations, be they large or small, to come together and do what they love the most with a professional-focused touch that can empower their careers and all that we can all gain from the professionalization of national football in our country.

We need to start somewhere, and the place where this change will be first created will be Sogakope. While we eventually want to extend this network of facilities to the whole country, we are now preparing to launch an IndieGoGo campaign aimed at raising $50,000 to help fund an ultra-modern football facility in Sogakope.

We want this to work as a facility that leads by example. If Keerapa can successfully create such a facility and prove that a group coming from Ghana’s civil society can create world-class-level football infrastructure, then we hope we can inspire other groups in other parts of Ghana to do the same—whether by joining us or taking a cue from what we do and replicating the model. 

In fact, we want to inspire other African football-focused groups to do the same—because waiting for governments to do everything we wish existed, and complaining about it for as long as this doesn’t happen won’t really change anything. 

So, if you want to join us in taking this first step, it’s very simple: please click here to join our IndieGoGo Pre-Launch and let’s make sure that, if everyone needs to play (as we believe and propose), everyone gets a chance to play and to get increasingly better at playing. We hope we’ll see you there!