Cricket’s gateway programme ‘Criiio’ bringing social change in Nigeria

Chisom Mary Okpe is a young girl playing cricket in Nigeria, living with limited means. Some days, she’s had to skip cricket training to help her mother gather firewood. Next January, she could represent the Nigeria U19 team in the women’s World Cup in Bangladesh and Nepal. Giselle, 14, would be the youngest member of that squad. She picked up a cricket bat only 18 months ago.

Neither player would have earned the right to represent their country so young, if not for a chance encounter with Criiio, the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) street-cricket programme. With limited equipment and without game knowledge, Criiio can be played at any nook and corner of a street — anytime, anywhere, by anyone.

“Criiio has just accelerated our growth path. The challenges around equipment and facilities were easily overcome,” said Uyi Akpata, president of Nigeria Cricket Federation. “The schools easily adopted the programme and we have conducted it in the strangest of places. Our biggest contributor comes from the North-Western part of the country, where they had had these issues around insurgencies, restrictions for females from playing the game. Being an entertaining form of the game, it has taken a life of its own around the country.”

While T20 cricket condensed the game sufficiently to be introduced to new markets, access to a large playing field, turf wickets and expensive equipment remained huge handicaps. Similar to Baseball Fast Five and FIBA (basketball) 3 on 3 and Park Run (community running), Criiio is cricket’s gateway strategy to spread awareness about the sport. The curriculum is games-based rather than skills-based. To remove barriers to entry and make it sustainable, the teacher training resource does not require a deep understanding of the game with certification given online.

Now, introduced to a million people around the world from Argentina to Rwanda to Spain and spread equally across genders, Criiio’s fastest adoption has been seen in Africa. Taking the programme to remote regions has thrown unexpected results. The next challenge is to see if introduction to cricket translates to feeding talent pipelines across continents, making the second most popular sport in the world truly representative.

“An almost unintended consequence is that it has created a critical mass of kids that love cricket,” said Will Glenwright, ICC’s head of global development. “Because remember, it's designed purely to provide that fun-first experience for boys and girls and to hopefully create a lifelong love of the game. We funnel as many into a participation pipeline. So from a Criiio experience into organised hardball cricket, and from there they feed the respective high performance systems of our members.”

“So the coaches identify these rare talents,” said Akpata. “In each zone, we have high-performance centres where they live in hostels, camp and cook for themselves. Within a period of three months, girls were able to work with better coaches. They could represent their zones at a PWC U17 championships.”

In Nigeria, Rwanda and Tanzania, cricket has just been recognised or approved by the government as a priority sport. Cricket’s re-introduction to the Olympics has accelerated the growth. Regional multi-sport games like the Africa Games, Asian Games, Pan American Games have begun to recognise cricket. “It changes the conversation that we have with governments and Olympic Committees,” said Glenwright. “We've seen in Tanzania, Nigeria and elsewhere, governments give us access to the school curriculum.”

The Criiio curriculum has also been devised in Mandarin, among other languages, to try and achieve cricket’s long-hoped-for aim to crack the Chinese market. It has led to partnerships with universities. Conversations are underway with the government to get cricket into the Chinese national games.