Fatma-The Kenyan girl breaking soccer ranks in Canada

At the age of 15, Kenyan Fatma Ramadhan living in Canada promises to become of the greatest female soccer professional players to follow in the footsteps of Doreen Nabwire who plays in Germany's women's Bundesliga for Werder Bremen. Born and raised in Toronto Canada by her Kenyan parents Mnubi Ramadhan and Sofia Ramadhan, Fatma holds an ambitious dream of playing at the FIFA world cup for the Kenyan national women’s soccer team.

Fatma currently plays in the semi professional Canadian OISL youth soccer league for the Rep club and studies at the Cawthra Park Secondary school in grade 10 equivalent to form two in Kenya.

Apart from playing soccer, she also holds a refereeing license from the Ontario soccer association and a youth coaching certificate which gives her the rights to coach budding stars and also to officiate youth league matches in their ranks.

She started playing soccer at a tender age of four years and as she recalls, the unwavering support from her mother Sofia has been her greatest encouragement throughout her 11 years of soccer excellence pursuit.

“My mum has been close to me each day I train or play and I only remember two of my training sessions that she has ever missed in my 11 years of playing soccer. She always drives me around Canada and travels with us whenever we go to play outside the country in America and I thank her a lot.” She says. “Soccer is a part of me and I look forward to the day when I will play for my mother’s country Kenya in the world cup.”

Playing for the very first time in Kenya this week at the dusty Messorra grounds in Buru Buru alongside the Makolanders ladies’ soccer team, Fatma believes Kenya holds immense talent in girls’ soccer but lack of support and equipment hampers their growth and development.

“It is a different experience to play in the dusty fields but it gives me a feel of my roots making me believe how privileged I am to have a positive rich environment for my career. It gives me motivation to work harder so that I can in future help in supporting my sisters back in Kenya to also achieve their dreams. But am humbled to see how happy the players are with soccer bringing smiles on their faces irregardless of their lack of enough facilities.” She said.

“The girls in Kenya are very talented with fantastic individual technical skills but I feel they lack a lot of technical support. In Canada we are taught to play a free flowing game with wide opening, moving the ball around, running into space and passing as a unit with beauty emphasized. Here it is the opposite where individual soccer seems to be more emphasized with the players running around with the ball other than running the ball around. The game here is also a bit more fast, physical and compacted.” She said.

As it is a dream of many footballers, Fatma aims to go professional and to play for big European clubs with a strong admiration of playing her professional career in Spain.

“I wanna go professional soon enough although my ultimate pride will be to play for my mother’s national team in the near future. Back in Europe, I see most of my team mates traveling back to go and turn up for their countries in international matches and I feel it is important for me to be identified with my home team as well in the near future.”

Her timing though did not find the best of moods in the women soccer circles as the national soccer team is still reeling from the effects of selfishness and poor leadership that saw the national senior soccer team withdrawn from participating in the oncoming All African games qualifiers against Sudan.

Kenya will now be forced to wait for another possible window of opportunity for the sleeping talents possessed by hundreds of Kenyan girls to get a chance of being exposed to the world.