Ahead of the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace on 6 April, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) sat down with Yoro Barry, a professional basketball player from Senegal and supporter of the “Sport against Crime: Outreach, Resilience, Empowerment of at-risk youth” (SC: ORE) programme.
“I had to beg in the street to be able to eat.”
Yoro Barry, a 23-year-old man from Médina Fas, Senegal, explains that he was a talibé – a student of the Qu’ran. His parents’ poverty led them to send him to a daara (a Qu’ranic school) when he was eight years old.
According to the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), Yoro’s experience is all too common. Though many daaras provide a strong religious education and teach important skills, an estimated 100,000 talibés are forced to beg on the streets – with their parents “unaware of the potential for abuse.”
It was a hard life. “There was violence in the streets, drugs, people who smoked and fought,” he recalls. “I sometimes slept for three or four weeks at a time in the street.”
One day, Yoro spotted kids playing on a basketball court. “I liked it,” he says simply, and began returning frequently to play.
“A man came to see me one day,” Yoro says, “because he often saw me playing basketball in the street.”
The man, Souleymane Diatta, “gave me my first basketball,” he adds, and connected him with the Dakar University Club, an association for culture and sports.
“They took care of me,” Yoro reminisces. “I slept in a room at the club and they gave me food.”
These simple provisions, together with the ability to play basketball, transformed Yoro. “Before, I was stupid, I fought a lot,” he says. “I was traumatized by what I had lived through on the streets.
“Without sports, I would have become a bandit,” Yoro adds. “Sports really changed my life; basketball has allowed me to become who I am and pushes me to also help others.”
UNODC, together with the International Olympic Committee, agrees with Yoro that the impact of sports can go way beyond the game or match itself.
As noted by UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed: “Sport has the power to align our passion, energy and enthusiasm around a collective cause. It is in our collective interest to harness the tremendous power of sport to help build a better and more sustainable future for all."
SC:ORE works to prevent and combat violence and crime through sports-based learning, mentoring support, and skills training to build more peaceful and safe communities and promote social inclusion.
It is based on the principle that participation in targeted sport programmes can prevent youth from being victimized. By offering youth a safe and conducive learning environment in which to grow and creating pathways to education, employability and social networks , sports can help them fulfil their potentials as agent of positive change in their communities and prevent their engagement in violence and crime.
Yoro is a fervent believer in the idea that sports can help promote inclusion and prevent violence and crime. He hopes that through SC:ORE, he can advocate for creating more space in marginalized neighbourhoods for kids and youth to play.
“I hope that this campaign will reach young people who were like me – and even adults – who are involved in violence,” he says.
If he could tell young kids involved in violence one thing, he says, it would be to “aim for something good – and to choose sports.”
SC:ORE builds on the UNODC Youth Crime Prevention through Sport initiative, including the Line Up Live Up programme, as well as the IOC’s Olympic Education Values Programme (OVEP). The project contributes to the realization of strategic priorities set in the Olympism365 strategy and UNODC Strategy 2021-2025, aimed at strengthening the role of sport as enabler of sustainable development and placing the realisation of the sustainable development goals and the welfare of people with local communities at the centre.
To learn more about SC:ORE, click here.
For more information contact Georgia Dimitropoulou georgia.dimitropoulou@un.org
UNODC/ DTA/Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Section.
