If you love basketball, you have come to the right place. The Basketball Experience was established for people like you. Since 2019, The Basketball Experience has inspired hundreds of thousands of young people across three African countries (Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal) to reach their full potential by using the sport as an effective vector of social integration. Kenya is the fourth implementing member of the project.
In its inaugural stage, the project mapped out about seventy schools, bringing together approximately twenty-five thousand young people aged between ten and nineteen. The project aims to promote a healthy lifestyle, build confidence, develop skills, and foster gender equality. The young people will be trained under a group of twenty NBA-trained coaches (ten women and ten men) whose coaching will go beyond the sport to impart crucial life skills to the young players.
The Basketball Experience is an AFD (French Development Agency) and NBA-funded project that is implemented by Expertise France in collaboration with local NGOs. The local implementing partner for Kenya is the Kenya Red Cross.
Our History
In June 2018, the AFD and NBA signed a partnership dubbed “Sport and Development.” Under this partnership, there exists the “Basketball Experience”. Launched by Expertise France, the program’s mandate is to establish sports as a formidable channel for education and awareness-raising among young people. By combining the practice of basketball with the learning of crucial life skills, this program seeks to align its benefit with the themes of sustainable development under the theme, One Court, Our Future.
Kenya, the fourth country to implement the program in Africa will launch its first sets of courts in July 2024 at the Kenya Academy of Sports in Kasarani. Expertise France is responsible for identifying and recruiting local partners (NGOs and Communication agencies) in countries of implementation. It creates a tripartite working relationship with the NBA and AFD by coordinating, planning, and monitoring local partners’ activities in conjunction with AFD’s networks in the field.
Chiefly, the program hopes to create a force with a bias for sports within schools in cities of implementation. It also aims to heighten the interest of public authorities, communities, and families to build awareness of the benefits of regular sports practice on the health and personal development of young people.
In Kenya, the program will have three components: developing community sports facilities, development of socio-educational youth programs, and program management and evaluation.
Lastly, there are ten rules that the legend, the late Kobe Bryant lived by in his twenty-year basketball career. One of those rules is “Get better every day.” For any basketball enthusiast, this is not just a famous dictum. It is a creed of life they swear to live by in and out of the court. One can get better only if they start. The Basketball Experience is an education through sports program that offers young people a chance to a good start with the vision of getting better every day. It is said that great things are not done by impulses but by a series of small things brought together.
