The N/A Cells: Who Erased East African Women's Athletics Data?

The N/A Cells: Who Erased East African Women's Athletics Data?

In August 2026, in a small studio on the second floor of a building on Ngong Road, Nairobi, I held a printed statistics sheet from Vihiga Queens' 2026-2026 season. The column for goals scored from high pressing read 23. The equivalent sheet for the Kenya men's national team read 14. I read both on air. Twenty minutes later, the station's inbox held two kinds of letters: one asking where I got the numbers, one calling me a liar.

Three years later, in March 2026, I sat in front of a different spreadsheet. International competition had stopped indefinitely. I wrote to twelve women's clubs in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda asking for any footage they still had, any sheet of paper they had not thrown away. What came back was empty cells. No match dates. No scorelines. No lineups. No split times. One three-character string appeared more often than any athlete's name in my entire archive: N/A.

Inside that pile of empty cells, one thing was not empty. Nine of the eleven East African women goalkeepers I reached still kept a tactical notebook they had written themselves. Handmade cardboard covers. Some bound with rubber bands, some with sugar-packet paper. Nobody had asked them to do it. No league paid for it. No statistics office had ever read it.

That is where I started.

Measurement infrastructure was built around men's stopwatches

When Kipchoge Keino finished at Mexico City in 2026, the world began looking at the East African highlands as a talent mine. From then on, every measuring device in the Kenyan athletics system — electronic timing, photo finish, wind sensors, World Athletics scoring software — was designed and installed to serve men's races. That is a technical fact, not a moral accusation. You build the ruler for what you intend to measure.

Women's races at Kenyan national meets were often scheduled last, sometimes run in full sun, sometimes with no wind gauge, sometimes with no photo finish. Very often the organisers recorded the winner's name and closed the book.

I once tried a small comparison by hand. I picked ten Kenyan women born between 2026 and 2026, each of whom had reached a national final at 800m or 1500m, and tried to reconstruct their personal progression curves. For a matching group of men from the same period, I found complete curves for nine out of ten. For the women, I found four. The remaining six had a single data point each: a personal best from one final. One point does not make a curve. One point does not tell you who is improving, who is stalling, who is running overloaded.

The gaps were not random. They sat exactly in the layers where money does not flow: national qualifiers, junior meets, school meets, inter-county friendlies. At the top layer, where sponsorship and Olympic medals live, women's data is recorded well because it serves a market. At the bottom, where ninety percent of women athletes actually live and compete, the record is nearly blank.

The absence of data is not randomly distributed. It follows the money.

Vihiga Queens and a pressing model nobody counted

Back to 2026-2026. To get those two numbers, 23 and 14, I had to do work nobody paid for: watch footage, hand-time, hand-count. I used one simple modern football metric — the number of passes an opponent completes before your team makes one active defensive action. Lower means pressing higher and earlier.

Vihiga Queens pressed at 8.4 that season. The Kenya men's national team hovered around 13.6. Nearly five passes per possession. In football, that gap is a different system, not a different shade. Vihiga split into two staggered blocks, three players high, and deliberately left the right flank open to herd opponents there and squeeze. They scored 23 goals from recoveries inside the final thirty metres. The men's national team scored 14 the same way.

Half of those goals came from one repeating pattern: the left midfielder forced the ball-carrier wide, the centre-back stepped up to cut the lateral pass, the striker dropped into the exact landing zone. Three players, one pattern, twenty-three times. That is a signature of deliberate coaching, not luck.

So why did nobody know? Because nobody was recording. The Kenyan women's league that season had no official data provider. No one sold numbers to the press. A journalist who wanted to write about Kenyan women's tactical football had to spend forty hours on footage for an article nobody would fund. The cost of recording women's football is pushed onto individuals, and that is how a system erases itself from history.

Forty pages and eleven notebooks

When competitions stopped, the invisible tacticians started speaking. In March 2026, with no football and no athletics, I turned to what I call tactical archaeology: digging up what people do not see rather than describing what they already have.

I collected amateur phone footage from twelve women's clubs in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The image quality was so poor I had to reconstruct phases in words. But during that correspondence I found something more valuable than footage: nine of eleven women goalkeepers I reached kept personal tactical notebooks.

The contents were not amateurish. One goalkeeper in Kisumu logged the free-kick habits of seventeen opposing players, with preferred foot, ball flight and the corresponding wall angle. One in Dar es Salaam drew her own positioning maps for every set-piece type, annotated with wind direction at her home ground. One in Kampala tracked her own menstrual cycle alongside the fixture list to know when her reflexes were slower — something no sports data system in the world collects at club level.

I wrote a forty-page report titled The Invisible Tacticians. Its central argument: resource scarcity does not produce tactical inferiority, it produces a different kind of tactics — tactics designed by the players themselves, for their own conditions, and recorded nowhere.

A defensive system hand-written in a cardboard notebook is still a system. It simply exists in no database.

Auditing six percent

In 2026 I was accredited at the World Cup in Russia. Throughout the tournament I did something nobody asked for: I measured broadcast time. I timed European highlight shows and sorted content into two buckets — tactical commentary and everything else.

The result: six percent of airtime discussed tactics. Ninety-four percent covered stars, beautiful goals, emotion and off-pitch stories. That is the number of a media industry choosing storytelling over analysis.

At the same time, the African Women's Cup of Nations ran in parallel with no international live coverage. African women's matches have possession, passing and foul-frequency data — but nobody collected it to compare. I built a twelve-part series, gathering data from amateur footage by hand, and placed two tables side by side: women's national teams at the African championship and men's teams at the World Cup. The series reached 2.1 million impressions.

The 2026 World Cup showed me clearly that Nigerians were being looked at, not watched. International audiences looked at the shirt colour, the hairstyle, the expression after a defeat, but nobody watched how their shape shifted when they lost the ball. The series had a concrete consequence: the Football Kenya Federation invited me as a media consultant to improve the women's game's image ahead of the 2026 African championship.

Six percent is an editorial choice, not a finding about the nature of the sport.

The top layer, perfectly recorded

At the top, the picture looks different, and the contrast exposes the problem. Kenya has Faith Kipyegon, who broke the 1500m world record in Florence on 2 June 2026 with 3:49.11, the first woman under 3:50. She lowered it to 3:49.04 in Paris on 7 July 2026, then 3:48.68 in Monaco on 12 July 2026. She also holds the world mile record at 4:07.64, set in Monaco in July 2026.

Beatrice Chepkoech holds the 3000m steeplechase world record at 8:44.32, set in Monaco in 2026. Beatrice Chebet set a 10,000m world record at 28:54.14 in 2026. Ruth Chepngetich broke the women's marathon world record with 2:09:56 in Chicago in October 2026. Pamela Jelimo ran 1:54.87 in Beijing in 2026, a world junior record still standing.

Those lines come with dates, venues, wind readings, altitude data. You can look up every hundredth of a second.

Now try to look up the fourth-place finisher in the Kenyan national 800m women's qualifier in 2026. Or the time of a twenty-year-old woman at the 2026 Nairobi school meet. Or the full list of Kenyan women who represented the country at 5000m during the 2000s.

You will get N/A.

A world record, perfectly recorded, can conceal thousands of careers that were never recorded at all.

Wind, altitude, and the ruler that was never installed

Nairobi sits at roughly 1,795 metres above sea level. At that altitude, air resistance drops and sprint marks benefit noticeably. Athletics handles this by recording the venue's altitude alongside the mark. For men's races. For women's races at many local meets, the wind gauge is sometimes not installed and altitude is not entered into the record.

The logical consequence is cruel. When you want to compare a woman who ran in Nairobi with one who ran in Mombasa, you lack the data to adjust. The comparison becomes meaningless. And a meaningless comparison is easily read as evidence that there is nothing worth comparing.

I tried that adjustment by hand for twelve women over 200m in one season. I found wind readings for four. For the other eight I had to estimate by matching men's races held the same day at the same venue, assuming equivalent conditions. That is not scientific method. That is what you do when the system does not give you the ruler.

Effort metrics and the borrowed-ruler trap

Here I want to argue with my own allies.

The natural reflex when women's data is empty is to import men's metric set wholesale and fill the cells. I think that produces a new kind of laundering. Distance covered and sprint counts are packaged as effort indicators. But ineffective running also produces pretty numbers. A player who covers eleven kilometres without once touching the ball in a dangerous position looks identical in the table to one who covers eleven kilometres and creates three chances. The table cannot tell them apart. The reader can.

Women's football is played on different pitches, at different fixture densities, with different physical cycles, sometimes with different bench sizes. Apply a metric set forged for eleven players with five substitutions to a league with three substitutes and you are not measuring ability. You are measuring scarcity and calling it ability.

On the transfer map, women are numbers filed in the wrong column.

The industry's most elegant logical trick

There is one logical leap I meet everywhere, from federation boardrooms to broadcast commentary booths. It runs like this: there is no data on women's sport, therefore there is nothing worth analysing, therefore there is no commercial value, therefore there is no investment, therefore there is no data.

I once sat in a meeting in Nairobi where an official explained that the women's championship did not attract audiences. I asked where the audience data was. He said there was none. I asked how he knew it did not attract audiences without measuring. He said everyone knows.

That "everyone knows" is the infrastructure. It sits in no dataset. It sits in the room. And it reproduces itself every season without a single line of evidence.

East Africa does not lack women's football talent; it lacks recorders. The same sentence is true of women's athletics, women's volleyball and women's basketball.

The price of holding the microphone

In this profession I belong to the group of pathfinders, and I want to state the price plainly, because it is usually told as an inspirational story.

The first channel is always the hardest, but someone has to hold the microphone. The price is not being called a joke on air. The price is becoming your own infrastructure. You are the camera operator, the timekeeper, the data entry clerk, the verifier and the person accountable when you are wrong. No editorial board stands behind you. No data room hands you a statistics table. When you publish a number, you are its only source, and that means you can be contradicted with nobody to defend you.

I have spent forty hours on footage for an article that reached two thousand readers. I have bought hard drives myself to store women's club footage, because no club had anywhere to keep it. Those drives are now in a drawer in my home in Nairobi. They are the largest archive of East African women's football from 2026 to 2026 that I know of, and they sit in an individual's drawer.

That is the most troubling part. Not that data was missed, but that it exists in the hands of individuals with no legal obligation to keep it.

The limits of mirror-checking

Not every gap is an injustice. There are real physiological differences, real differences in fixture density, real differences in a sport's development history. Turning every difference into proof of discrimination weakens the cases with real evidence. My check is to go back to the athletes and coaches. If they say the problem is the pitch, I write about the pitch. I do not impose a framework on people and call it their voice.

There is also a second version of the same error: reducing every defeat to gender. When a women's team loses because its back line stepped up at the wrong moment, the cause is tactical. Writing it as a gender tragedy strips them of the right to be analysed seriously.

Equal treatment does not mean equal praise. It means criticism at the same level of precision.

I do not look for a level playing field. I draw my own lines.

I refuse one version of this story: the one where East African women athletes are heroic survivors running on dirt roads who finally shine through willpower. That story sells, and it also erases everything worth analysing. It turns them into symbols of suffering rather than tactical subjects with specific technical decisions.

What I want to leave behind is not a conclusion but a habit. Every time you read a women's sports statistics table and see empty cells, ask who decided not to measure. Every time you see a women's world record covered loudly, ask where the fourth-place finisher in her national qualifier at nineteen sits in the database.

I do not look for a level playing field. I draw my own lines. Nine cardboard notebooks belonging to East African women goalkeepers taught me that before any gender-equality-in-sport workshop was ever held in Nairobi. They did not wait for the ruler. They made one by hand, logging opponents, wind, and their own bodies.

What remains for us is not to leave those rulers in the drawer.