WTTD 2021: Taking Matters into Your Own Hands
You, too, can become part of the change like 25 others! No matter who you are, if you care about your mother, your sister, your friend, your neighbour, your grandmother, YOURSELF: Join the World Table Tennis Day movement on 6 April 2021 to contribute to gender equality and female empowerment in your community through table tennis.
Table tennis can be a powerful platform and tool for advocacy, raising awareness for gender equality and female empowerment. Addressing current gender inequalities across participation, performance and leadership in table tennis, as well as in our everyday life, can make a valuable contribution to this goal. This is why we chose FEMpowerment as the topic for World Table Tennis Day (WTTD) 2021. We hope that you will join this cause, too – even if Covid-19 forces you to stay at home – we will make sure that you can participate from everywhere all over the world.
Watch our promotional video with subtitles in Arabic, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
Why it matters
We can’t emphasize it often enough: Everyone is equal! Unfortunately, gender inequalities faced by girls can already start at birth and possibly follow them all their lives. So, everyone should be equal! We all have to remember: Women and girls represent half of the population of the world, which includes half of the world’s potential!
Within the table tennis world, we have a general low participation rate of girls and women. WTTD 2021 and your event can promote equal participation, address constricting gender norms and can help to foster gender equality in countries, territories and communities where women and girls are being discriminated.
Our goals
The aim of WTTD 2021 is to achieve change on individual and community level. In general, we hope many of you are using and getting inspired by the educational opportunities we share – whether it is our newsletters, social media polls or maybe the Inspirational Women Series – in order to make your WTTD event count in your community and to increase the participation, performance and leadership rate of females in table tennis.
Additionally, it will hopefully create a change of mindset of those who do not yet understand gender equality, or who do not believe that inequalities take place.
With the WTTD Promoters Initiative we do not only want to support up to 100 different WTTD events worldwide, but we also hope to create a network and strengthen and empower especially the female promoters to become a role model. However, this does not mean that we discourage male candidates from applying – they also serve as role models and show that we all need to work together to fight this cause.
What has been done so far
So far, we have published seven newsletters, where we…
- Shared more in detail our thoughts on FEMpowerment
- Explained how to smash gender inequalities with table tennis and create safe spaces
- Highlighted the fact that gender inequality is omnipresent, but we have to get active now
- Showed that we – everyone involved in table tennis – have to turn the tables on violence against women and girls
- Emphasised that gender equality cannot be achieved without boys and men
- Encouraged people to spin it like a girl – we must put an end to stereotypes!
- And explored how to build a better future for ALL together!
Above this, our WTTD Promoters initiative is growing and we reached our first milestone: 25 % of the slots are taken. All of them show courage, creativity, empathy and strength, the best mix to approach and foster female empowerment and gender equality through table tennis. We are delighted to welcome each and every one of them from 21 countries and territories to the WTTD family.
75 slots are still open! You want to organise a WTTD event on 6 April in light of our topic FEMpowerment as well? Apply now to become a promoter. All successful candidates will receive a clothing kit including a WTTD Promoters shirt, an ITTF Foundation certificate and 250 € to alleviate a part of the WTTD event expenditures.
If you have troubles opening it, please download the document below and send it together with the requested attachments to april6@foundation.ittf.com.
Everybody can apply and we highly encourage females to use this opportunity to join this cause and to lead the organisation of an event supported by the WTTD Promoters Initiative.