‘Mine is not the story of a white man doing good in Africa, but that of young people creating and inspiring profound and lasting change in their communities’. 
This was the response of Robert ‘Bob’ Munro, who passed away two days ago at the age of 84, to those who asked him to talk about Kenya's most famous sports social project, but above all one of the first in the world to show a future, a way to salvation using sport as a vehicle to ‘make it’, through study and discipline, in one of Africa's most degraded slums that is home to almost a million people.
Mathare Youth Sports Association is the continent's largest ‘self-help’ youth sports and community development project. Started in 1987 in the Mathare slum, to date more than 14,000 young people in over a thousand teams participate in MYSA sports activities. In addition to this, young people participate in slum clean-up, while the entire project deals with AIDS prevention, leadership training, young prisoners and has established schools for photography, music and other community development activities. Another 10,000 boys and girls, not only Kenyans, participate in a similar sports and development project started by MYSA in 1999 in the Kakuma refugee camp in north-western Kenya.
The success of the initiative also depends on the competitive spirit: Mathare United, the football team created as the sporting spearhead of the project, has played for years steadily in the Kenyan first division and in 2008 also won a historic championship, which went down in history as the first championship for a team created from a social project, in a top league in the world.
Football is a team sport and nothing like a slum reflects the indissoluble belonging of people to a ‘team’, i.e. a community of like-minded souls, with the same needs, the same problems, the same dreams and goals. 
‘There are no problems, there are only challenges’ was Munro's motto.

A Canadian, a business manager at home and one of the first experts on environmental solutions, Munro moved with his wife Ingrid to Kenya in 1985. A visit to Mathare completely changed his life and the idea of ‘doing good’ was born, on the one hand with missionary dedication, on the other hand with entrepreneurial spirit.
In almost forty years, the MYSA project, in addition to athletes who have achieved good results and sustained themselves through their activity, has trained dozens of managers, executives and workers in sectors even outside sport and at the same time, thanks to donors and partnerships, has strengthened infrastructure and created international connections, so much so that the MYSA programme has spread to over twenty countries and is renowned in the field of development.  
It is no coincidence that Kenyan institutions have also recognised him; Munro was awarded the highest national award, Elder of the Burning Spear, just last December by President William Ruto, on the occasion of the country's independence celebrations.
Bob Munro's example was also essential for the creation of the Malindi football academy project, which he set up in 2009, just when Mathare United had made national headlines. The coach who has been guiding the younger boys since then and now also oversees the first team, Real Malindi, Davis Badili Kenga, trained precisely at Mathare United, to learn the social approach applied to football.
For this alone we will thank those who first thought of this formula that is winning even when you don't win, because it aims much higher than just a goal. Asante sana, Bob.