I’m Naa Shika Adu- a Ghanaian cultural and sports leader working at the intersection of sport, culture, education, and youth development in Africa. My work focuses on designing African-led systems that use sport and creative practice as tools for gender equity, workforce readiness, and long-term opportunity for young people. I operate across grassroots communities and institutions, building platforms that translate creativity, play, and discipline into pathways that last.
I’ve spent nearly three decades in competitive sport, first as an ITF & National tennis athlete, and later as an International tennis coach and, systems builder. Over time, my relationship with sport evolved; from performance to purpose. I came to understand sport not as recreation, but as infrastructure.
I created West Africa’s first closed-loop model that trains and employs female university students as tennis coaches. Through PASCo, I’ve reached over 4,000 young people.
I served on the Ghana Tennis Federation’s Gender, Equity & Equality Committee and coached internationally in the USA and Italy, focusing on player development, resilience, and mentorship.
As a student-athlete at the University of Ghana, I captained the women’s tennis team to national and continental titles and remain the university’s highest medalist at the 2018 GUSA Games. I continue to mentor young women athletes, helping them push beyond the boundaries of sport.
My methodology is captured in PlayTEd: The Neuroscience of Play, an educational curriculum and forthcoming book using play, movement, and creativity to support cognitive , motor skills and emotional development in children.
Alongside practice, I write and speak on: Sport as cultural infrastructure, Youth development and gender equity in Africa, Education and workforce readiness, African-led innovation and systems building.
This work is grounded in lived experience and translated for institutions, partners, and policymakers.
African Sports Alliance was founded in 2017 as a multi-arm platform structured around: Training and capacity building, Creative storytelling, cultural documentation and Youth leadership incubation.
Through PASCo, I’ve worked with schools, communities, institutions, and partners across Ghana and beyond. To date, this work has reached over 4,000 young people.
Street Tennis began at a personal breaking point.
After experiencing a mental breakdown, I relied on sport as a form of grounding and recovery. That experience led me to explore how individual sports could be embedded into communities regardless of income, age, or background.
Tennis & talk sessions in Nima brought together women from diverse life experiences — widows, single mothers, teenage mothers — using play as a form of relief, connection, and therapy.
Today, Street Tennis has evolved into an urban youth engagement and leadership incubator, using sport as a non-invasive entry point to build trust, surface community challenges, and co-create solutions with young people.
I was a little girl when I discovered that art could hold what sport could not say. As I trained, competed, and pushed my body, drawing and creativity became my outlet and release. My upbringing was strict, disciplined, and demanding but drawing allowed me to process pressure, express feeling, and make sense of the world around me.
I welcome conversations with partners and institutions interested in youth development, culture, and systemic change.