My Beauty Best Teacher

In Ghana:

Starting on a small scale, training just a few boys on a dust pitch in Accra, the Right to Dream Academy has grown to the point at which it is today; a hugely successful fully residential international school, offering scholarships to talented children drawn from all over Ghana.

Image courtesy of Candace Feit

The focus and guiding principle of the Academy is that every talented child has the right to dream of a better, brighter future and can reach their full potential when nurtured through a carefully structured programme in a safe and healthy environment.

In March 2010, we officially opened the new RtD Academy, a US$1.5million purpose built facility, located 20km south of Akosombo in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The new Academy provides a home for our expanding programme, with specialist facilities and resources located onsite, to ensure our students can reach their true potential in life...[more]

We have highlighted the commodity resource characteristics of football players within the continent.I would like to ask, why cant we build up an African football space comparable to South America's professional leagues with all its consequent non-material and financial benefits? John Wilson expands on the African state of affairs in the Guardian:

Image courtesy of orble

...there's something distasteful about an economic system that means the best players from Africa, if they're to be properly remunerated, have to move to a different part of the world to perform for western Europe's benefit. That's true of other parts of the globe, of course, but the economic imbalance isn't as stark and, elsewhere, doesn't have the same awkward echoes of colonial exploitation.

Talk of a new slave trade is unhelpfully emotive, but there is an unpleasant traffic in vulnerable and often naive young players, and it seems hard to deny that the demands of the European market have shaped the tactical development of African football. Tom Vernon, who runs an academy near Accra in Ghana and scouts for Manchester United, speaks of the "Pape Bouba Diop" template: having seen the success of big, muscular west African players, clubs go to west Africa looking for more big, muscular players and so that sort of player is prioritised, something that in part explains the dearth of west African creative players in the decade between Abedi Pelé, Jay-Jay Okocha and Kanu and the emerging generation of Kwadwo Asamoah, Dede Ayew and Gervinho.

It even suits the football administrations of individual countries within Africa to pretend that all is well, that things are developing. Not to do so, after all, would be to admit failure, and to do that would be to risk the sinecures that bring wealth, prestige and influence. The myth of Progress is sustained by a conspiracy of the complacent and the self-interested.

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