In 2005, soon after the High Commissioner, Paul Boateng and I had arrived in South Africa, we were invited to Alexandra Township in Johannesburg to witness the third delivery week of a remarkable private/public partnership which had brought together the Southwark Borough of the Met Police, Charlton Athletic Football Club, British Airways and the British High Commission in a project which aimed to make the township environment safer for young people.

The Met Police in the Borough of Southwark had faced very similar problems to ones that the South African Police Service (SAPS) faced in the urban townships in South Africa.  Serious youth crime, child abuse, drug abuse, gun and knife crime, absenteeism from school, and a poor relationship with law enforcement officers were commonplace. Sir John Stevens, the then Met Commissioner, invited SAPS officers to Southwark to see their work, and they were so impressed they asked for the product to be imported to Alexandra, a township with a high concentration of people and many living in informal housing. And so a project was born.  

The key to the project’s success in Southwark was getting the youth into school and off the streets in the evenings.  The tool was football and the local team, Charlton, were used to run football coaching at before-school clubs, and in the afternoons and evenings.  Jason Morgan, now the CEO of Charlton’s Community Trust, first went out on his own with a bag of balls into one of the UK’s most difficult policing areas.  The club now runs the largest and most respected football community project in the world.

In October 2005, the High Commissioner and I witnessed the last year of this hugely successful three-year project, part-funded by the High Commission, which had seen the introduction of SAPS School Officers, 36 coaches trained to the FA’s level qualification, 10,000 young people given the experience of coaching, and the establishment of a SAPS Cadet Unit.  The project had been so successful, I just couldn’t leave it at that, and in early 2006, I was invited with the UK partners to give a presentation on the project at a soccer conference at Chelsea’s ground.  There I persuaded the UK partners to consider a more ambitious second leg to the project which would take the team to not one, but two difficult communities in Cape Town, Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain.  Funded from the post’s Bilateral Fund, between 2006 and 2008 the UK partners worked with SAPS and Ajax Cape Town, one of the local Premier League teams.  

Learning from their experiences in Alexandra, Charlton realised that they needed a local soccer partner to ensure a lasting legacy.  Mixing two communities that didn’t get on was a challenge, as was tackling a serious drug problem and gang crime.  Sir Ian Blair, the last Met Police Commissioner, officially launched the project in March 2007. Over the two years the project delivered 22 Schools Officers, 70 community coaches were trained, 12,000 young people engaged in the programme and Ajax Cape Town embedded football into the community structure, with a whole range of schemes to keep youth people out of trouble. 1200 young people are engaged each week by the South African partners.

And that now takes us to 2009. With Cape Town being such a success, I again persuaded the UK partners to move the project to Durban in the two years leading up to the 2010 World Cup.  In February, we embarked on the last two-year leg of the project, working in the INK area north of the city of Durban.

The very new Met Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, on one of his first assignments, visited South Africa and officially launched the project in KwaMashu.  It was wonderful to see Met Police, BA and Charlton staff (Chairman, Deputy CEOs, and Borough Commanders alike), some of whom have been with the project since its inception in 2002, giving up their time so passionately to a project that is a very important part of their lives.  

The city of Durban see the project as a 2010 World Cup Legacy.  The Deputy Police Commissioner, speaking at a reception in Durban, said that as a child he would run away from the police because they were so scared of them.  Now everything was different. He said his lasting memory of the week was seeing the schoolchildren boarding the busses to go home, singing “we are safe, we are safe”.  At a national level,  the South African Police Service have been so taken with the project that they are planning to roll it out nationally.