The teams are playing right now, two streets away. Those hours of sports build the daily habits that protect young people in Langa from substance use and risky behaviour.
€ 75 a month keeps a team playing.

What keeps a teenager away from substance use and risky activities? Not lectures. Not warnings. According to a model that transformed youth behaviour in Iceland — and is now taking root in Langa — the answer is simpler and harder at once: belonging. A team. A coach who shows up. A reason to be somewhere on Tuesday afternoon. Team sport delivers all of that, plus confidence, friendships, self-esteem and positive peer engagements. Skills that outlast the final whistle.

In Langa, the will is there. The kit, the balls, the boots, and so on—those are what’s missing.

South Africa, in areas such as Langa, has adapted the Planet Youth model, originally developed in Iceland in the late 1990s as the Icelandic Prevention Model (IPM). The IPM has shown that youth behaviour—particularly efforts to reduce substance use and risky activities—is best influenced by strengthening protective factors in daily life: family, school, community, and peer networks, rather than through isolated individual interventions.

In Langa, organizing sports is limited mainly by a lack of materials and resources.