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It's a bright, warm afternoon in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Oliver Percovich is standing by a fountain.

Local children in shorts and sandals line up around its concrete edge, waiting for their turn.

Light from the sinking sun filters through the fingers of the pine trees that ring the area, dancing across the faces of the children who have already slid in.

A group of young boys is getting impatient; arms crossed over their chests, kneeling and whispering and pointing.

Below them, half a dozen girls from the nearby apartment complexes -- pale, brutalist blocks built by the Russians in the 1990s -- glide around, laughing and learning each other's names.

But there's no water to be found.

Instead, the sounds of trickles and splashes are replaced by the soft rattle and scraping of skateboards. Percovich watches on as the children take turns slipping into the empty, grey bowl and roll around on the boards he's provided them.

It's 2008, a year after Percovich arrived in Afghanistan. Having quit his job as a researcher in emergency management at Melbourne's RMIT university, the Aussie followed his partner to Kabul and set about looking for work. In the interim, broke and unemployed, he decided to get to know his new home a little better by riding his skateboard through the local streets.

This is where the idea for Skateistan began.

"The interactions with kids on the streets of Kabul was really interesting," Percovich told ESPN. "A lot of them were there because their parents worked out that kids could earn more money begging than anyone else in the family, so any time there's a foreigner on the streets of Kabul, you have a whole lot of kids that come up and ask them for money.

"I was the wrong person to ask for money because I didn't have any. I just had a skateboard.

"What was interesting was girls were also asking for money. I would turn it around and say, 'well, do you want to try my skateboard?' in my extremely broken Dari. That sparked something in me because I didn't see girls playing soccer or flying kites or playing cricket or doing the things that the boys were doing.

"Women are not riding bicycles, women aren't driving cars, there's no women serving you in a shop. It was a shock to me. As much as I'd read about Afghanistan before going there -- and I kind of knew the situation -- but the reality [was still a shock]. And then, all of a sudden, these little girls are trying out my skateboard. That was the first light-bulb moment."

Percovich began to run small skateboarding activities for local children, finding any space he could in parks or schools where they could learn to ride safely. But it was in the empty fountain where he realised that his sessions were having a more profound impact on its participants than he had ever imagined.

"The real 'eureka' moment for me was just noticing the interactions between the children," he said.

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"The girls were incredible in terms of making friends across these ethnicities and across these socio-economic divisions. One day, they all held hands and started to dance around in the fountain and sing songs and I was just like, 'wow.' Through skateboarding, these kids have come together that wouldn't normally come together. They're interacting with each other. They don't care what background they come from.

"It was incredibly powerful. I basically saw the Afghanistan of the future."

Twelve years on, Skateistan has become one of the biggest international non-profit organisations in the sporting space. From that small fountain in Kabul, the award-winning NGO now boasts four indoor skate schools -- with a fifth soon to be built in Bamyan, a rural area of Afghanistan -- across three different countries, with their global headquarters in Berlin.

Over 2,500 children between the ages of five and 17 attend the facilities each week, half of whom are girls, due to a quota system. To quell the anxieties of families sending their girls to schools in dangerous areas, Skateistan organises home visits and offers free transport and security for all female students.

It costs more, Percovich says, but it's a necessary sacrifice the organisation makes to redress the historical inequalities that disproportionately affect women and girls.

"At the start, we had space for 360 students, so we made half of those spaces available just for girls. We were able to register about 160 girls, so we still had 20 spaces left, but there was something like 300 boys on the waiting list. I just capped it at whatever the girls' numbers were.

"I'm a very clear quota person. I said, right at the start, 'there aren't equal opportunities for girls to do sports in Afghanistan, so I'm going to give the girls three times as much time on the skateboard than the boys.'

"That's what has to happen to create that change, to shift the scales. If it takes 80% of our resources to get 50% girls into the program, that's what has to happen."

More than just learning to ride skateboards, though, Skateistan has become a space that also provides more formal educational opportunities for children whose formative years were interrupted by war, poverty, and dislocation. Importantly, this aspect of the organisation evolved after listening to and addressing the needs of the children themselves.

"What was missing was those first years of education," Percovich said, "so we came up with our 'Back To School' program, which was an accelerated learning program that covered three years of regular primary school in one year. Then we had a Memorandum of Understanding with the education department to recognise those studies and allow the children straight into the fourth grade.

"But our ideas around education were about what the potential of creativity in education is. That whole region of the world really utilises rote learning; simple repetition of what the teacher is saying, a lot of memorisation, and not a lot of creative or critical thinking.

"So it was really about developing the voices as loud as possible, as well as possible - especially for the girls. The focus was 'Skate and Create'; we did one hour of skateboarding and one hour of creativity-based activities in the classroom.

"That creativity part is very much embedded in skateboarding as well: there's no right or wrong way to ride a skateboard. There are no rules; you can do it any which way you want. And I think that's very much at the heart of what we do: we want to teach the children to think for themselves, to make mistakes, to fall down and be okay with it and get back up again. To open their minds to what they could actually do.

"It's so interesting to see young girls -- especially in Kabul -- enter the program, walking into the facility with their head down, looking at their feet, not being able to interact with other people or the environment. You can tell that they're extremely subservient at home; they literally don't have a voice.

"To see that growth through skateboarding ... they drop in on a ramp after a couple of weeks and they've done something they never thought would be possible. And then, straight away in the classroom, they're putting up their hands, ready to ask questions. There's a confidence-building part and there's a no-rules part as well."

Navigating the gender, class, and cultural barriers facing girls in Afghanistan was difficult for a white Western man. But Percovich's background in development meant he understood the importance of engaging with local communities and ensuring they played a central role in decision-making.

"It was very much me being in the background as much as possible, then pulling out foreigners as fast as possible from the overall set-up once we felt like we had the stability that was necessary," he explained.

"It was listening instead of prescribing, 'what I think is best for you.' It's more, 'you know the context, you know the problems, how can we be here to help?'

"So it's more of a scaffold; it's more, 'here is a support network, what would you like to do with it?'"

That handing over of administrative responsibilities has also allowed more women to become involved in the higher levels of Skateistan. Women now make up over half of the organisation's global workforce, and occupy the majority of higher-ranking roles. This includes Zainab Hussaini, who's now the country manager for Afghanistan's three skate schools in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif and, soon, Bamyan - where she's from and which she recommended as the fifth school.

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"When I first joined Skateistan, I found that [it] was a safe place," Hussaini told ESPN from her office in Mazar-e-Sharif. "Safer than the public schools, because Skateistan was providing free transport for girls and connecting to the family directly. It was trying to speak with fathers and mothers to convince them that what we are teaching the students here and how our lessons will affect their children [is okay].

"Most of the families are not allowing their girls to be, for example, part of the football federation or a football team in Afghanistan, travelling outside to practice in a ground or a court that the boys are [using]. So Skateistan is making an opportunity for the girls, for women, to participate in sport activities in a very safe way.

"The boys and girls are coming in separate days. The coaches are female for female students and male for male students. We are following Afghanistan's rules -- the government's rules -- in our lessons, even in our sports sessions, to make sure the parents are confident that this is a good place for your child.

"Everything is free, they have a safe space, and when they feel there is nothing threatening them, they can learn better. There's something here for everyone."

Now a mother herself, Hussaini reflects on how much Afghanistan has changed in the last 20 years, and how important women and girls are to the future of the country.

"There were lots of issues, especially with girls in public schools," she said. "Most girls were not allowed to go to school because of the traditional way of the male of the family's thinking, and sometimes the traditional way of their mothers and grandmothers as well.

"The other problem was, when a girl graduated from high school, she was not allowed to go to university because boys and girls are sitting together and learning. It was taboo during the Taliban regime. It was right after the Taliban regime that the girls got this chance to go to universities and sit together with men in a room and learn the same subjects the men are learning.

"But people are changing their minds. The people today found that we have to change; the ways that we were following many years ago was not the right way. A country can be developed by improving girls and women. We cannot say that women and girls are not part of our community; developing them, improving them, we will be seeing the improvement [of Afghanistan] faster."

Hussaini herself recognises the role that sport and physical activity plays in empowering women and girls in this part of the world. In 2015, with the help of Skateistan, Hussaini became the first Afghan woman to run a marathon in the country. At the start, she was the only one. The following year, over 100 girls were running beside her.

"I strongly believe that sport is an important part of peace," Hussaini said. "Sport can bring peace. In the past, the people were talking about the next generation, and we were the next generation. Today, you can see that the next generation is bringing change.

"Sometimes limitations let people grow and find the right way. We don't have to just sit and say, 'yes, we're a poor country, we're insecure'; we have to use these opportunities, even if it's not for everyone. We can use the opportunity and spread it to other girls and women. We need to be ready to help others; you need to grow other people beside [you].

"Sport is a tool for bringing change. I hope, in the future, a day comes that we do not speak about women and girls in sport as a taboo; that, 'oh, wow, this woman is very strong because she's running a marathon in Afghanistan.'

"It should be something common and it should be something normal that a woman is running beside a man or that a team of females playing soccer is respected like a boy who is playing soccer. I hope for that future and I'm sure that it will come."

Skateboarding has now become one of the most popular sports in Afghanistan for women and girls. Some of its graduates have gone on to become leaders within Skateistan itself, passing on their own knowledge and experiences to those frightened young girls who, like them, shuffled into its facilities with their heads down and voices silent.

Emerging from the wreckage of the War On Terror, Skateistan is proof of the role sport can and should play in helping rebuild a society - namely, by empowering its people and giving them the resources to rebuild it themselves.

As global sport reckons with its new capabilities and responsibilities in a post-COVID-19 world, Skateistan offers a model of how sport can be used to create genuine, generational change in the lives of its participants.

It is not the thing in itself that makes sport valuable; rather, it's what sport leads to -- self-confidence, community, education, and the broadening of one's horizons -- that makes it a springboard from which a more equal, inclusive world can be created. Sometimes, as Skateistan shows, all it takes is a skateboard, an empty fountain, and an idea.

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Skateistan - The non-profit using skateboarding to empower women in Afghanistan - ESPN.co.uk