Naandi’s Sports for Life programme was launched in 2018 with the goal of unlocking the potential of Nanhi Kali girls across India by building a vibrant sports community just for them. Today, it is a community led by women, for women and young girls, and it makes sports and physical education accessible and genuinely enjoyable – as they should be! One of the most important goals is to inspire girls to reignite, or create for the first time, a safe and positive relationship with sports – one that enables them to understand how their body works, how it is best nourished, and how to channel the values of teamwork and sports to joyfully explore their dynamic capabilities on the field. Our dedicated team of women on the ground, who coach the girls through their sports journeys and oversee the programme’s evolution, have witnessed incredible transformations of girls and their families. As girls embrace self-confidence through newfound physical capabilities and create unforgettable memories from events like the Toofaan Games and Toofaan Cup, their families come to realise that there are many more paths and possibilities for their daughters to grow into maturity and find joy, strength, and inspiration.
In 2019, just one year into its operations, Sports for Life received the prestigious “Development and Peace through Sport Programme of the Year” award from Peace and Sport – global leaders in the social development field. Naandi very gratefully recognised this award as a mark of approval and support which affirms the programme’s unshakeable mission to make sports relevant and accessible to the Nanhi Kali girls and young women managing it across India.
Fortunately, the award also brought an invaluable new partnership. It was at the Peace and Sport conference that year that Naandi’s Sports for Life leaders, Rohini Mukherjee and Lisa Murawsky, first met Dr. Paola Gigliotti. With a vibrant, multidisciplinary career as a practising doctor and a professional athlete – having also served as a judge on the Peace and Sport panel, a medic for FIS skiing competitions, a mountaineer, and a professor at the University of Perugia in Italy—Dr. Paola was very impressed by the Sports for Life programme. Her support for Naandi and its work to empower girls and women through community-driven sports and physical awareness initiatives quickly blossomed into a long-term collaboration, with significant benefits for our programme.
Dr. Paola’s expertise has helped the Sports for Life curriculum to evolve with various nutritional awareness modules. By drawing from her specialised knowledge in the fields of sports medicine and nutrition, she supported our teams in developing educational materials and visual aids which simplify important concepts for Nanhi Kalis: Why is drinking water important? Why is it important to have a balanced diet? What could a balanced diet look like across different states in India? Why do certain foods make you stronger? What is inside these foods? And how can these elements bring strength, endurance, and energy? Dr. Paola also used virtual platforms to provide nutrition orientations for our women leaders on the ground. Finally, in 2022, she traveled to India to attend Toofaan Games in Hyderabad, where she presented medals and trophies to the top-performing Nanhi Kali athletes and spoke with women sports officers about the importance of nutrition in the physical development of young girls.
Recently, Dr. Paola presented an exciting prospect to Naandi: an invitation to introduce Naandi’s Sports for Life program to her sports science students at the University of Perugia in May 2025. (Fun fact: this university, founded in 1308, is the world’s ninth oldest!) Thrilled by the opportunity and with a clear vision of what could be achieved, the Naandi team led by Lisa Murawsky made the journey to hold a workshop for about 100 sports science students. The workshop unfolded a unique challenge: how to convey the heart and impact of this programme to students who might never have set foot in India? What can be said to make them grasp the daily lives of these girls, and what it really means for them to travel beyond their villages, meet and befriend girls like them from across the country, and participate in national sports events? The answer, they knew, lay not only in telling the story, but showing it to them too.
Footage from the Toofaan Games and Toofaan Cup, Nanhi Kali’s “Lessons from Football” video, interviews with women soccer coaches (known as Game Changers), and a video on the birth of SportStar — Naandi’s own sports app — painted a vivid, more compelling picture of our programme in action. These films offered a window into grassroots excellence that has profoundly impacted young girls and women from underprivileged backgrounds, helping them find a safe community rich with opportunities to pursue sports. Some of Perugia’s students identified with these girls’ experiences, as they, too, grew up in areas of Italy where facilities and opportunities to play were scarce or non-existent. The sports journeys of these girls, women, and students stand in contrast to the polished world of professional athletics — a world defined by glamorous sponsorships, elite players in top-tier gear, and roaring crowds in grand stadiums. So the videos not only fostered a deep sense of connection and relatability across continents, but also revealed the remarkable creativity, courage, and resolve with which these girls and women utilise the resources at their disposal to transform sports into joyful reality for themselves.
After the videos were screened, the workshop’s focus was brought to a single, important task – to invite the students to describe, visualise, and compare the subtle yet crucial differences between soreness and injury in the context of sports. Knowing how to distinguish between the two is an important skill that we want to extend to our girls and their coaches. The collaboration with such a bright, engaged group of students was a success, as they found creative ways to break down and portray these complex sports medicine concepts so that they can be easily and visually adapted for the girls in our program. It’s about knowing how to listen to your body while playing sports – recognising when you simply need rest, when a good stretch will do, or when it’s a more serious injury requiring a longer period of rest and recovery. This knowledge empowers them to understand and safeguard their own bodies as they push their limits.
The partnership with Dr. Paola, and the sports workshop that grew from it, exemplifies one of Naandi’s key values: to prioritise knowledge sharing and mutual benefits for all parties. The Perugia students and their supervisors were challenged to break down their sports knowledge into simple, accessible explanations and visual aids, making their expertise more relevant and useful to a diverse range of people in the world of sports development, many of whom do not have formal or academic backgrounds. For Naandi, it was another success in bringing world-class knowledge and resources back home to equip what could be the next generation of women athletes or football stars with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to pursue their dreams.
