Kick It Up! Girls Report on the 2010 World Cup

by Sarah Menkedick · 2010-06-12 07:00:00 UTC
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The nonprofit Global Girl Media, which aims to empower high school-aged girls from under-served communities by teaching them about digital media and providing them the equipment and training to become digital journalists, has started a pretty awesome project called "Kick It Up!" for the 2010 World Cup.

The Kick It Up! project will train twenty girls in the South African community of Soweto and 10 girls in Los Angeles to produce video stories from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The girls will be given training in story development and composition as well as video editing, production, and distribution. Their reports will be shown in a wide variety of media, including ESPN, BBC, Univision, KPFK, Al Jazeera, GritTV, Soweto TV, self.com, internews.org, and Huffingtonpost.com.

The goals of the project are multi-layered: first, to offer girls who have grown up in under-served communities the opportunity to make their voices heard in the male-dominated domains of media and sports; second, to give them practical training and equipment to kick off journalistic careers; and third, to challenge the dumbed-down stereotypes of the mass media, which insists that young girls care only about boys and mascara and are unaffected by and uninterested in issues of race, class, politics, and injustice.

I must say, I'm a huge soccer fan and an avid, almost obsessive, follower of the World Cup, but I find the near total absence of women depressing. The coverage from women in Mexico, for example, features "Maribel" cavorting with lions in a zebra-print miniskirt.

So it's inspiring to watch a girl in this video assert, "the World Cup never includes women in any form ... " and to know that this project will include young women in the Cup in a meaningful, critical way, and that these women will, through reporting, become increasingly aware both of the gender inequalities in sports and media and the way that they can begin to challenge these inequalities.

To find out more about the project, donate, and/or share more information, check out the GlobalGirl website.

Photo credit: Frerieke

Sarah Menkedick is a freelance writer currently based in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has spent the last five years teaching, writing and traveling on five continents. She regularly writes about women's rights.
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