Uganda GAA

Uganda GAA is an organically grown GAA club founded by Ugandan friends Moses Amanyire and Robert Bakaze after coming across videos of the great Irish sport hurling and Gaelic football on YouTube in 2019.

Moses, our club’s trainer, is a PE teacher and introduced hurling and Gaelic football to his school on a trial basis, and it grew from there as word got around of how the kids got such fantastic enjoyment from playing. The club is 100% Ugandan-led, and we are a young club in every way, with the oldest player only being 14 years old.

The club was up and running for two years before any Irish involvement, which shows the positive power the internet can have in spreading different cultures around the world. With no guidance, Moses and Robert “gave a lash” at making hurls from looking at pictures on Google and started making hurls from local wood, Mvule and Mahogany. For health and safety reasons! The Mahogany hurl has now been put aside and left in the dressing room due in part to a wonderful donation from the Cultec of over 100 hurls. Although we currently have enough hurls for the club, we are very short on all other equipment; we need everything you can think of that is required for any GAA club to be able to train children.

We put out a social media appeal for any second second-hand helmets, boots, football gloves, and old jerseys that people would have lying around at home that were not being used. This appeal is to enable the club to ensure that the 120 Ugandan schoolchildren who have fallen in love with hurling and football have the equipment they need to play and that as the club grows, we are not held back by a lack of equipment. The response has been won excellent, showing the great community spirit that the GAA brings out in people.

We didn’t expect such an amount of people who don’t have old sports equipment to want to help and offer a donation so that we may purchase what we need. To this end, we have set up this GoFundMe page so that people who want to help but don’t have sports equipment can donate and positively impact the children in Uganda playing GAA.

Schools are underfunded in every area in Uganda, and we want to do what we can to ensure that the children have the right to play sports and the equipment to do so. Our goal is to place a complete set of equipment required for 20 children to play in as many schools as we have equipment for. The equipment is for the school and not individual children, and thus, we are leveraging each donation to ensure that it gains the maximum value and use for the children and schools. It also helps foster a greater sense of collective and community ownership of the equipment and the emotional benefits children gain from participating in team sports.

We are organising the first All-Uganda championship to be played the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day 2023, and everything we raise will ensure a great day out for the children.

Gender parity is something that all involved are keen to have at the centre of the club. You rarely see girls participating in team sports in Uganda, and we can’t fix that overnight, but we are determined to do our bit to include girls in the club and ensure that all children are seen as equals. In this regard, we currently have two girls’ teams and hope that by March, we can have four girls’ teams play.

We are grateful to everyone who donates equipment or to this GoFundMe page. Your kindness will ensure that the Uganda children falling in love with the tremendous Irish sport of Hurling and Gaelic football have a great day in March at the first ALL-Uganda GAA championship and for years to come.