This Football-for-development (F4D) coach education programme will introduce you to the Generation Amazing (GA) Coaching philosophy and methodology. The programme adopts a twin- tracked approach which focuses mainly on the development of life skills and sport skills.

This Course will introduce you to safeguarding and child protection in sport. The unit will raise awareness of the need to safeguard children and vulnerable adults. As part of your learning, you will be involved in tasks that require you to self-assess your understanding of safeguarding and the importance that organisations MUST place on safeguarding children in sport.

This Course will help you to gain an understanding of the distinction between developing football in communities and developing communities through football. The Course presents the twin-tracked approach adopted by Generation Amazing. You will be asked to reflect on the value of adopting a twin-tracked approach and how you might play an effective role in delivering sport and life skills outcomes. You will also be introduced to sport for development as a field and how football-for-development is part of the wider Sport for Development and Peace (SfDP) initiative.

This Course will introduce you to critical pedagogy and its contribution to social change or transformative processes. The football-for-development coach will be required to possess critical thinking skills in order to support participants develop their own critical consciousness. During this Course, you will engage in activities that will provide you with opportunities to develop your facilitation skills. You will be made aware of your role and the value of effective facilitation of critical discussions to gain a good understanding of social realities. The Course aims to support the promotion of a conducive atmosphere, enabling democratic discussions which are key to supporting transformative actions. 

This Course will introduce you to conducting a needs assessment for the purpose of identifying local needs to support the design of appropriate social interventions. We will explore the use of a Problem and Objective Tree approach to enable an analytical approach to identify causes and effects of identified problems. You will be introduced to conducting a situational analysis which will reveal information to enable you to gain a good understanding of the contextual factors underpinning any problems. Finally, you will engage in setting project objectives, and selecting a solution(s) from the alternatives stating how football can make a contribution to addressing some of the identified causes.

Life skills are psychosocial abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life1. Examples of life skills include critical thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, setting goals, critical awareness or effective communication. As we go through our daily lives, we develop life skills as a result of constructive processing of information and as we try to make sense of our experiences. Hence, life skills are those skills that help us respond to everyday life challenges.

This Course will introduce you to various forms of social exclusion that may be prevalent in a particular community. Young people living in multicultural communities experience forms of social exclusion or their communities lack community cohesion due to race, religious beliefs, caste or class system, social economic status, negative attitudes towards refugees etc. Your own community might be facing a range of these factors that fuel lack of community cohesion and result in social exclusion or marginalisation of certain groups. We will explore these issues and how they might be resolves by helping you to gain an insight into how football sessions can adapted and used as a vehicle to help avoid your community participants being socially excluded.

This Course focuses on the different experiences of the impact of social injustices between women and men. Globally, every community has characteristics of gendered power relations and gender roles that either empower or disempower certain members of that particular community. Such gender hierarchies have a significant bearing in how women and men will benefit from the social interventions that has been designed to address the community’s identified social issues. This Course aims to highlight the importance of undertaking a gender analysis to help stakeholders gain an understanding of how gender relations and gender roles impact upon the social intervention. Participants will be engaged in activities that will promote application of gender analysis frameworks during the planning stage of a social intervention.

In this Course, you will be introduced to the topic of mental health and wellbeing. You will get the opportunity to explore and develop competence in being emotionally, socially and mentally agile. With a focus on agility, the Course will increase your contextual understanding of triggers that can lead to mental ill health, as well as processes that can ‘buffer’ and protect against this, so as to raise awareness and support for developing agility.