Harambee Starlets in Morocco without working structure

Harambee Starlets' Eglay Mukhwana contests for the ball with Morocco's captain Ait El Haj in their Women's Africa Cup of Nations Group A opener at Stade Prince Moulay Hassan in Rabat on July 26, 2026.[Harambee Starlets, Facebook]

The clock on my television read 59 minutes, and the match had been over for half an hour. Morocco 4-0 Kenya, in white letters on a pink bar in the corner of the screen. One of Harambee Starlets defender walked back towards the halfway line with her head down.

On the touchline, a member of the Kenyan delegation had folded himself into a couch, elbows on knees, in the posture of a man working through arithmetic whose answer he already knew.

I watched the whole unforgettable match on Sunday night from Nairobi, and what struck me was not that Morocco scored four times.  It was how ordinary the goals looked. Sakina Ouzraoui Diki in the 19th minute, Maryame Atiq in the 28th, Ibtissam Jraidi in the 32nd and again in the 46th. No deflections, no controversy, no goalkeeping error worth arguing about. The Atlas Lionesses did what a properly assembled team does to an improperly assembled one.

The numbers were worse than the scoreline. Morocco held 65.9 per cent of the ball and attempted 17 shots, 10 of them on target. Kenya managed two attempts in 90 minutes. Goalkeeper Lilian Awuor, the only survivor of the 2016 squad that lost all three of its group matches, made six saves and was still beaten four times.

It is tempting, in the hours after a night like this, to look for someone to hold responsible, and the coach is always nearest to hand. That instinct should be resisted. Beldine Odemba took a team that had not qualified for the continental tournament in 10 years and got it past Tunisia and then past Gambia. Whatever went wrong in Rabat was decided long before she was appointed.

Morocco has spent two decades building, while Kenya has spent two decades discussing. Its federation adopted a formal development plan for the women's game in 2020 and then funded it, paying the salaries of players in both the first and second divisions and covering the cost of jerseys, balls and team transport so that clubs could not plead poverty. An Under-17 championship began in 2016.

A sports-study programme, allowing girls to pursue both schooling and football at once, was introduced in 2017. The number of registered female players rose from roughly 5,000 in the middle of the last decade to more than 60,000 by 2023. The team that beat Kenya has reached the last two finals, and it’s coached by Jorge Vilda, the man who won a World Cup with Spain.

Kenya's ledger reads differently. In March, clubs in the women's top flight were boycotting fixtures because money from the Women's Development Fund had not arrived, and the Football Kenya Federation president Hussein Mohammed said publicly that none of it had reached his office since he took over.

In April, relief arrived in the form of a sponsorship worth Sh4.75 million across two competitions. The 12 clubs of the Women's Premier League shared 2.95 million of it, which works out to Sh100,000 per club for an entire season.

The most instructive detail is Kenyan. Violet Wanyonyi, who is part of Harambee Starlets squad, was the leading scorer in Morocco's first division in the 2024-25 season, with 28 goals. Somebody else's system sharpened our best forward, because ours could not do it.

What follows is not complicated. Ring-fence the development fund and publish quarterly accounts. Make a funded women's team a licensing condition for every men's FKF Premier League club, as Morocco did. Build genuine girls' competitions at Under-17 and Under-20 levels across the counties. Write minimum contracts and medical cover into the women's league.

Senegal comes on tomorrow, Algeria on Sunday, and a semi-final place still carries a first World Cup ticket. Kenya may yet take something from this group. But last Sunday was not a verdict on 11 women. It was a verdict on the country that sent them.