"Football boots as a gateway to freedom"

Tuğba Tekkal, born in Hanover in 1985, grew up in a large family with eleven children. She is of Kurdish-Yazidi descent. Her parents came to Germany as guest workers before she was born in the 1970s.

Tuğba showed a special talent for football at an early age, but girls playing football did not fit in with her parents' traditional image of women.

As a result, Tuğba secretly played football with the boys, her older brother enrolled her in a club and her parents only found out when Tuğba was 16 years old.

After leaving school, Tuğba Tekkal went to HSV as a professional player, then to 1. FC Köln and was promoted to the first women's Bundesliga. At the age of 32, she ended her football career to devote herself entirely to human rights work.

Under the impression of the genocide of the Yazidis by the terrorist militia Islamic State in 2014, she founded the human rights organisation HÁWAR.help e.V. together with three of her sisters in 2015, which is now involved in many different projects for human rights all over the world.

About the project:

SCORING GIRLS is a football and education project for girls aged 8 to 18 that Tuğba Tekkal launched in 2016. There are three locations in the large Yazidi refugee camps in Iraq, three in Cologne and four in Berlin.

Tuğba Tekkal, who says that football boots were her gateway to freedom, wants to use Scoring girls to give girls from precarious backgrounds with or without a history of immigration, regardless of religion or origin, self-confidence and prospects through playing football and, in particular, to overcome the feeling of marginalisation these girls experience.

Scoring girls is not just about playing football. Support is also provided off the pitch, for example with homework, the search for an apprenticeship or visits to the authorities. Excursions are organised at the weekend and cultural events are attended with the girls. Tuğba Tekkal also brings the girls together with role models from all areas of society in order to show them prospects for their future lives. Angela Merkel and Anna-Lena Baerbock have already visited the Scoring Girls.
"We observe team spirit, empathy, a sense of responsibility and leadership strengths in our girls that might not have been evident without the project," says Tugba Tekkal.

This statement from one girl shows just how much the project means to the participating girls:
"I'm an outsider everywhere but in Scoring Girls ".

Further information can be found at https://www.hawar.help/de/projekt/scoring-girls/