Ability Friendly Football Program

Qatar Foundation Ability Friendly Program in collaboration with Generation Amazing are expanding their inclusive football program to ensure it can open sporting opportunities for more young people with disabilities across Qatar. 

The QF Ability-Friendly Program offers the chance for affordable community sports classes to become more readily available to children and adults with special needs, including those with physical, mental, and visual impairments, deafness, and Autism, as well as other learning challenges.

The program includes specialized camps and football classes that tailored to the participant's individual needs.

From this month, the program will be offered at Qatar Academy Al Khor and Qatar Academy Al Wakra, both of which are schools under Qatar Foundation’s (QF) Pre-University Education. Sessions will take place in a safe and supportive environment and will involve experienced coaches from both partners.

QF’s Ability Friendly Program has been operating for over two years in Education City and has since offered hundreds of children and adults the opportunity to participate in regular football classes, just as their siblings would do in mainstream classes. Now, this focus on accessible sport would be extended to even more locations throughout Qatar.

Ability Groups

• Autism
• Learning Difficulties
• Visual Impairments
• Hearing Impairments
• Deaf
• Physical Impairments

Football Classes

Specialized coaches will offer these numerous classes, designed to accommodate the various abilities of children and adults.

Delivery Activities

The Ability Friendly Program currently delivers through four stages.

Regular Sessions

These sessions are delivered over the course of the term, 34 weeks of the year, giving the Qatar community the option to choose a time that is suited for their needs. One parent recently commented; “The coaches are just wonderful. I’m so glad and amazed at the efforts and patience they show to get children involved.”

Schools/Centers Delivery

In collaboration with schools in Qatar, we have been able to reach more stakeholders and achieve greater impact. The training sessions have made a significant difference in the students’ lives; “One student, Jude, has a phobia of open spaces and large areas to the degree that he would bang his head on the floor and cry in the early stages of the sessions. However, during the last session, he played and interacted with his fellow students and scored several goals.”

Camps

Summer Camps and year-round Community Engagement Camps have been adapted to help athletes with disabilities access them. These camps involve numerous activities and promote inclusion, striving to help all participants access sports regardless of ability. One mother recently commented; “Thank you all for providing such a professional and amazing summer camp (Ability Friendly Summer Camp). My son attended that summer camp under the supervision of professional and sincere coaches and mentors. He loved it so much and wished it lasted for the whole summer.”

Events

The Ability Friendly Program is regularly involved with local and international events. This is to create more opportunities for our athletes and help other organizations become more inclusive. Our involvement includes supporting other events as well as coordinating our own. One mother recently stated; “Very thrilled and proud that my daughter with autism could show people that children with autism can participate in these big events.”

Education

The Education program is designed to change the current standard of qualifications for delivering sports activities for disabled people. According to Sport England: Active Lives 1 (2015) Disabled people are twice as likely to be physically inactive (43 percent) than non-disabled people (21 percent). This is structured through three activities;

Disability Awareness Workshop

The Disability Awareness Workshop is designed to help understand how to support Participants to access Sports. The Program is delivered through guided discovery, experience, and theoretical discussion. Working closely with various Organizations, it will endeavor to increase the awareness of how Society can adapt to support the various needs of Participants.

The Generation Amazing Ability Friendly Inclusion Module

This module has been designed by experts in curriculum content development from Generation Amazing and the ‘Ability Friendly’ program. As part of the collaborative approach which has been used to design this module, Generation Amazing, and the Ability Friendly program identified that being inclusive, in the context of including people with disabilities in sport can be positively achieved using specially designed football for development practices, delivered by skilled and trained coaches/educators.

The HBKU Ability Friendly Coaching the Coach Courses

Helping Practitioners develop the necessary practical Coaching skills to support disabled people accessing sport. The Coaching the Coach Programme represents a participant-centered learning and assessment activity with the objective of encouraging individuals to develop the required competencies for Coaching participants with various abilities access Football.

Community Outreach:

Partnerships

This involves the strategic development of the accessibility movement toward sustainable activities that are suitable for people with disabilities. Our ambition is to work closely with numerous sectors in order to provide more opportunities for our athletes.

Volunteering Provision

One aspect of the program is to engage QF volunteers in our events and activities. Currently, we are recruiting volunteers from the following categories.

• Education City students, from both schools and universities.
• Qatar Foundation staff

This enhances the program delivery and makes it more sustainable. It also gives children and adults participating in these events the chance to engage with volunteers of different backgrounds.

Contact Us

Email: abilityfriendly@qf.org.qa or send a message via WhatsApp Mobile: 30689576.

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