L’Athlétique d’Haïti is an after-school sports that serves 1,500 children from ages 6 to 17 in Cité Soleil and Bel Air, the poorest slums Port-au-Prince. Even though soccer it’s the primary sports discipline at L’Athletique d’ Haiti, participants also practice other sports disciplines like basketball, ping pong and track and field. The program offers a nutritious daily meal and transportation to its participants.
L’Athlétique d’Haïti Projects
NEED: Out of 1,032 schools in Port-au-Prince, only 4 offer sports to their students. While the law provides for athletic programs, there are neither funds, fields nor physical education teachers. In a country where soccer is a national obsession, the lack of sports programs deprives young people of the opportunity to acquire self esteem, discipline and dedication – the skills developed through playing sports.
RESPONSE: Over the past 15 years, L’Athletique d’Haiti has developed physical and human infrastructure mechanisms to provide sports to children in Haiti. Currently, l’Athletique d’Haiti is serving over 1,500 children in five different locations in Haiti: two in Port-au-Prince (Drouillard and Cite Soleil), one in Jeremy, one in Delande (Artibonite) and one Simonette”.
While many children and parents see the club as a way to make it to the Haitian National team and also as a route to college scholarships or professional teams outside of Haiti, there’s more to the program than sports. By encouraging youngsters from wealthier families to compete with those from the slums, Robert Duval is also chipping away at the barriers of long divided Haitian society. And as Duval points out, “Some of these kids have a lot of talent, not only for soccer. Maybe it’s school or music or writing poetry. But sports will lift them to the next level of life.”
- Finbar O’Reilly, National Post, Canada
