The KANJU Campaign is the first major fundraising drive of the non-profit social enterprise; Harper Performance. We provide support to aspirational athletes from some of the most disadvantaged communities in the world, specialising in providing accessible, culturally relevant, and financially sustainable performance-support to ‘underdog’ athletes and sports organisations.
The KANJU Campaign will directly benefit three sports-beneficiaries across Africa with comprehensive support from the Harper Performance team of expert practitioners.
Beneficiary 1: THE MONROVIA FOOTBALL ACADEMY, LIBERIA
Monrovia Football Academy (MFA) is the first school in Liberia to combine high-quality education with elite football development. The MFA provides Liberia's talented youth with academic classes, football training, and life skills lessons to improve academic performance, break down gender barriers, and prepare students to lead positive change in Liberia. The Academy exists to prepare talented boys and girls to lead positive change in Liberia.
Harper Performance has been tasked with auditing and developing the performance-support available to the student-athletes at the MFA. With over 230,000 children in Liberia suffering from clinical malnutrition, a big focus of the programme will be to develop strategies to combat some of the socio-cultural challenges associated with growing up in Liberia.
Malnutrition can seriously impact a child's natural maturation - our team will be working together with the chefs and staff at the Academy to develop a nutrition programme that supports normal maturation in the developing elite footballer. The rest of the team will be focussing on the athletic development and sports medicine capacity at the Academy with a priority on protecting the health and wellness of the student-athlete whilst aiding their long-term athletic development.
Find out more about this project HERE.
Beneficiary 2: PROJECT AFRICA ATHLETICS, KENYA
Project Africa Athletics (PAA). PAA is a not-for profit organisation set up in 2014 to help support athletes and athletic clubs in rural areas of East Africa, primarily focusing on Uganda and Kenya. Project Africa Athletics provides ongoing training support, race logistics and travel assistance to aspirational elite runners in the region.
In 2017, Hillary Chirchir of Project Africa Athletics won the Jersey Marathon, and PAA runners have enjoyed significant success at events across Europe, including the Dublin Marathon, the Barcelona Marathon and the Great North Run. Through their race winnings, PAA athletes have been able to drive their own development back home; building new homes, purchasing land, planting crops and supporting their families.
Check out the video below as Dan Tanui, PAA Runner outlines the improvements he's made in his community from his race winnings.
Harper Performance has been tasked with auditing and developing the non-running training capacity, and the nutrition and sports medicine provisions at Project Africa Athletics. Kenya has an impressive record in developing elite runners using their traditional training methodology. The HP team will be working with the coaches and athletes on the ground to develop the runner's resilience to injury, maintain performance-levels long-term and increase career longevity. The HP medical staff will be working in collaboration with PAA to develop a relevant and accessible long-term educational programme to improve injury management, recovery and preventative medicine provisions, including infection control and disease prevention.
Find out more about this project HERE.
Beneficiary 3: THE FOOTBALL-FOR-GOOD ACADEMY, UGANDA
The Football For Good (FFG) Academy launched in Gulu, Northern Uganda in January of 2015 and quickly became the country's best full-time residential youth football academy and scholarship programme. The FFG Academy provides a professional youth football set up that delivers elite training and competition, a world-class education, a character-building programme and global opportunities on the field and in the classroom.
Elite opportunities are rare in post-war communities like Northern Uganda, where international funding and support is centred on 'programs-for-all'. That sole focus creates a leadership gap, where there's little chance for potential high-achievers to get the education, training and character building they need to go from 'good to great'. The FFG Academy is leading social change through a programme that will provide A, elite academy football training, B, enhanced academics and C, a character-building programme, ensuring that every graduate has an international pathway to success.
The Football-For-Good Academy is the most advanced project Harper Performance will be working on in the 2018-19 cycle. HP has been tasked with completing a detail-focussed audit of the Academy's performance-support provisions with a particular focus on the nutrition, sports medicine and off-field training capacity of the organisation. The HP team will be working in collaboration with the staff and coaches at the FFG Academy to ensure relevant and accessible long-term educational programmes are put in place to plug skills-gaps in the Academy's staff.
This project will see the FFG Academy and HP developing a bespoke and sustainable long-term athlete development programme for footballers in Uganda to protect the health and wellness of the athletes as well as optimising on-field performance.
Find out more about this project HERE.
WHO ARE HARPER PERFORMANCE?
HARPER PERFORMANCE is an SEUK Certified Non-Profit Social Enterprise based in London supporting aspirational athletes from some of the most disadvantaged, deprived and marginalised communities in the world. We specialise in providing innovative, culturally relevant, financially sustainable, yet highly effective performance support to ‘underdog’ athletes and organisations, often hamstrung by logistical, economic and sociocultural barriers to sporting excellence.
Our mission at Harper Performance is not to transplant the high-performance sports systems of Western Europe, Australia or the USA to the organisations we work with in Liberia, Uganda or Kenya. Instead, we are looking to utilise the expertise of the small and agile HP Projects team to foster free-form development in these disadvantaged, deprived and marginalised athletic communities.
Read more about our mission HERE.
Ownership of the performance-support systems of those we work with remain in the locality, with our team there to plug skills-gaps, provide expertise in the same way we would with a client back home and help facilitate the development of a ‘Monrovian/Kenyan/Ugandan’ solution to performance-support for elite athletes. After all, the best solutions to problems, in elite sport or otherwise, are local, developed by the people closest to the problem, not solely by our team, not by any think tank in the comfort of their London offices preaching theoretical and formalised solutions.
Our mission is to build capacity, not reliance, to complement, not take over and at the very core of that is to remember that the informal, rule-breaking, locally-driven hustle that is ‘kanju’ when combined with sound science holds the answers we seek! Kanju, put simply, is a "specific form of creativity born from African difficulty”. It is a rule-breaking, informal and super-agile ethos that makes it possible to just get things done in the face of constant obstacles, headaches, failing infrastructure, corruption and a dogmatic and bureaucratic banking system.
Read more about KANJU via our campaign blog HERE.
Utilising the expertise of our team of expert sports science, sports medicine and athletic development practitioners, all of whom boast a minimum of five years experience working at the top echelons of elite sport in the UK, Australia and the USA, we deliver support in the following key areas;
> ATHLETIC DEVELOPMENT <
> STRENGTH & CONDITIONING <
> SPORTS NUTRITION <
> SPORTS MEDICINE & PHYSIOTHERAPY <
> ATHLETE LIFESTYLE & PSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPORT <
> PRACTITIONER DEVELOPMENT & MENTORING <
Find out more about Harper Performance HERE.
CHECK OUT THE REWARDS!
We've put together an exciting set of reward packages as a big thank you to our pledgers, see below for a quick guide to what rewards you can secure with your pledge. Access the full details in our online brochure right HERE.
Please contact us if you require international (outside of UK) shipping. Additional costs apply.