Isha Johansen, the Sierra Leonean who rises to the top of the football ladder

Isha Johansen is one of the few women to head a National Football Association in the world. In 2004, the former Sierra Leonean athlete founded FC Johansen for child survivors and orphans of the civil war. Since 2013, she has been the president of the Sierra Leone Football Association. 

Born in Freetown in 1965, Isha Johansen grew up in a family where football was omnipresent. Her father, a banker,  who was also a football fanatic, co-founded one of the biggest football clubs in the country at the time. As a child, she spent her days with her brothers, playing football. Cradled by football since a young age, she remained attached to it, even if she evolved more as an athlete and also won a table tennis champion title.

After her business studies in London, she founded Rapture magazine, but the civil war, which shook the country for years, stopped everything, leaving the country destroyed, children orphaned and lost…

In 2004, while walking through the streets of Freetown, she met once kids playing football barefoot, with a pebble as a ball. Touched by their destitution, she made them an offer: give them football uniforms, food and in return, they go back to school. This is how FC Johansen was created. 

Opened to young boys aged 10 to 12, the club uses football to provide structure, training, education and opportunities for children displaced by the civil war. Within a few years, several of these youngsters managed to join the best European teams. The club has also become one of the most successful in Sierra Leone with national and international awards.

In 2013, building on the success of her club, she ran for the presidency of the Sierra Leone Football Association. Despite obstacles, criticism… she was finally elected President of the Football Federation. This enabled her to launch several projects including Power Play Africa which is an initiative to develop and educate girls through football.

In October 2020, Isha Johansen was appointed a member of the FIFA Women’s Football Committee and the FIFA Women’s World Cup. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the African Football Confederation (CAF) which also chairs the Women’s Committee of CAF. On January 16, 2021, she attended the opening of the African Nations Championship (CHAN) in Cameroon.