Kenya to host African Club Association 🇰🇪⚽️

Kenya continues to make moves, harnessing the power of sports 🇰🇪⚽️.

This week, alongside the opening of the National Basketball Association (NBA)’s office, Confederation Africaine de Football (CAF) announced that its new African Club Association would be hosted in Kenya 🏛.

👀 Here’s what we know so far about the new ACA :

📌The association was formed to represent and protect the interest of African clubs
📌 The association will work with members to make African football club financially and commercially viable
📌 It is governed by a 15-member board representing every region and chaired by 🇹🇿's Hersi A. Said of Young Africans Sports Club (Tanzania's most titled football club).

Football aficionados will see the similarities between ACA and ECA (down to the branding..). I’m interested in seeing best practices being shared among clubs (this could perhaps lead to inspire other disciplines !).

🔍 CAF picking Kenya as the host of its latest association is no accident. There has been a push to ensure that football activities were more evenly distributed on the continent.

🛫 Prior to the pandemic, the country had already begun an effort towards leveraging sports to boost the tourism sector (which is one of the largest forex revenue and a significant contributor to the GDP - 8% pre-pandemic).

🏆 As a reminder, Kenya will be one of the hosting nations of the 2027 nations and also won the bid for the 2024 African Nations Championship (CHAN). Kenya recently hosted the World Rugby U20 Championships and is set to host (at least) 3 Marathon races next year.

🏟 But not every bid has been successful, last year the country lost the bid to the 2025 World Athletics to Japan due to infrastructure concerns 👎🏾.

To address the infrastructure issue, the Kenyan Defence Forces were handed the construction and renovation projects of four stadia to be unveiled in 2025 💥.