Sport in Rivera's Schools: The Programme Being Designed

There is a version of corporate philanthropy where an organisation arrives at a rural school with a box of footballs, takes a photograph, and leaves. Everyone involved feels good for a week. The balls are worn out by March, and nothing structural has changed.

The Phoenix Initiative's second pillar is sport for social impact, and one of the programmes currently being designed under it involves schools in Rivera, the municipality in Huila where Phoenix Oasis is being built. Nothing has started yet. No sessions have been run, and no school has committed to anything. This article describes the design and the reasoning behind it, published while the plan can still be improved.

The gap the programme is meant to address

Start with the international picture, because it is unambiguous. The World Health Organization recommends that children and adolescents aged 5 to 17 should do an average of at least 60 minutes a day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, mostly aerobic, with activities that strengthen muscle and bone on at least three days a week.

The WHO also reports that the great majority of adolescents worldwide do not reach that level — and that in almost every country studied, adolescent girls are less active than adolescent boys. The gap is not a matter of a few percentage points, and it widens through the teenage years, at exactly the age when many girls quietly stop playing anything at all.

That gap is the target. Not "getting kids moving" in general — that is too vague to design against — but the specific, measurable, internationally documented drop-off in girls' participation during adolescence. You can read the WHO guidance yourself at who.int.

Why "with" Rivera schools, not "for" them

The single most common failure of externally designed school programmes is that they answer a question nobody in the school asked.

The intended approach is therefore to start with a period of listening rather than delivery: sitting down with head teachers, PE staff where they exist, and municipal sport officials, and asking what they already run, what they are short of, and what has been tried before and did not work. That last question is usually the most useful and the least asked.

There is also a practical reason. Colombia has a national school curriculum that includes physical education, and Rivera has its own institutions, its own sport calendar and its own existing local leagues. A programme that ignores all of that in favour of something new and branded is a programme that will end the day the funding does.

What is actually being designed

The current shape of the plan has four components, and none of them is a box of footballs.

• Regular after-school sessions, run at a predictable time each week rather than as occasional events. Consistency is what produces a habit; a one-off is entertainment.
• Coaching for the adults already there. Training PE teachers and volunteer coaches costs less than staffing sessions indefinitely, and it stays in the school when the programme moves on.
• Equipment that is maintained, not just given. Any donation of equipment is planned with a replacement and repair arrangement attached, because unmaintained kit is a two-season gift.
• A route for the ones who want more. For students who take to a sport seriously, the plan is to connect them with existing municipal and departmental structures rather than build a parallel system.

The girls-first design, and why boys are not excluded

Phoenix Oasis will be a women-only centre. The foundation's school work is not required to be, and the design does not exclude boys.

But the priority is explicit. Where a choice has to be made about which session runs, which age group gets the coach, or which team gets transport to a fixture, the plan gives the tie-break to girls — because that is where the documented gap sits, and because in mixed settings the equipment and the pitch time have a way of drifting in the other direction without anyone deciding it should.

There is an argument for role models here, and Colombia does not lack them. This is a country whose women athletes have reached the highest levels — from Olympic champions in BMX and athletics to a national women's football team that reached the quarter-finals of the 2023 World Cup. A twelve-year-old in Rivera does not need to be told sport is possible for women. She needs a session on Wednesday, a coach who expects her to turn up, and a way to get home afterwards.

Measuring what actually matters

The plan commits in advance to measuring the boring things: attendance across a full school year rather than at launch, retention of girls specifically between one year and the next, and whether the trained teachers are still running sessions twelve months after the programme's direct involvement ends.

What it will not do is count "children reached". That number is easy to produce and tells you nothing about whether anyone kept playing.

What this has to do with a retreat opening in 2028

It is a fair question. Phoenix Oasis is a women's sports and transformation centre that will open on 30 June 2028 for guests travelling from around the world. A school in Rivera is a different thing entirely.

The connection is the premise. If the argument is that physical training changes how a woman occupies a room — and that is the argument the Oasis is built on — then it cannot only be true for women who can afford a flight to Colombia. A foundation that says sport builds confidence and then reserves it for paying guests has not understood its own claim. The school programme is where that claim gets tested on the doorstep. The Phoenix Initiative sets out how it fits with the other two pillars.