Reflections on sportfordevelopment:

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Reflections on sport-for-development a maturing
field
Prof Fred Coalter
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Re-thinking the north-south dialogue
Liberia post war conflict resolution Senegal
rural Muslim communities South Africa1 peer
leader training South Africa 2 vulnerable
children Malawi street children and
re-integration Uganda 1 HIV/AIDS Uganda 2 IDP
camps Tanzania HIV/AIDS and female empowerment
Mumbai Slum, street children and peer
leaders Calcutta railway children
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Sport-in- development
Sport plus
Plus sport
Sport
Sports development is a surprisingly difficult
term to define Houlihan and White Intriguingly
vague and open for several interpretations Kruse
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Shift in aid paradigm
Economic ? cultural, human and social capital
Louise Fréchette, the UN Deputy Secretary
General. World Sports Forum March 2000 The
power of sports is far more than symbolic. You
are engines of economic growth. You are a force
for gender equality. You can bring youth and
others in from the margins, strengthening the
social fabric. You can promote communication and
help heal the divisions between peoples,
communities and entire nations. You can set an
example of fair play. Last but not least, you can
advocate a strong and effective United Nations.
Kofi Annan 2002 Olympic Aid Roundtable Forum in
Salt Lake City Sport can play a role in
improving the lives of individuals, not only
Individuals . but whole communities. the time
is right to build on that understanding, to
encourage governments, development agencies and
communities to think how sport can be included
more systematically in the plans to help
children, particularly those living in the midst
of poverty, disease and conflict.
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Going beyond the touch line
2005 UN Year of Sport and Physical Education,
collaborated with organisations in the
commercial, public and voluntary sectors
what was missing, however, was a systematic
approach to an important sector in civil
society sport . the United Nations is turning
to the world of sport for help in the work for
peace and the effort to achieve the Millennium
Development Goals.

• Universal primary education
• Promoting gender equality/empowering women
• Combating HIV/AIDS
• Addressing issues of environmental
  sustainability

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Its more than a game Beyond
participation
Outputs opportunities
?
Sporting inclusion
Traditional SD Equity
? Sporting Outcomes
Skills, rules, ethics

?
Individual impacts
Personal/social development/attitudes
? Individual
outcomes Behaviour
?
Strategic outcomes Community
regeneration/social capital
Conflict resolution
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From strategy to tactics
?
?
Sport Magic box social
vaccine
? Sport presumed to have causal powers ?
Closed system medical/treatment model
.there is nothing about sport itself that is
magical.It is the experience of sport that may
facilitate the result. Papacharisisi and Goudas
(2005)
Questions like what conditions are necessary for
sport to have beneficial outcomes? must be asked
more often. Patrikson (1998)
? ? ? ? ?

• Mechanisms, processes and managing for outcomes
• Families of programmes ? families of
  mechanisms
• Programme theories
• Assumptions about participants?

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Engaging whole communities Sport and civil
society

• Importance of a (sports) organisation as much
  as sport
• Reflecting local needs always sport plus
• Clubs as catalysts/conduits
• Participation, empowerment and development
  of human capital
• even ME
• Not just projects.stability and
  sustainability

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Peer leaders and role models Anything you
can do
Traditional SD leaders/coaches as inputs
Sport-in-development outputs ? responsible
citizens ? inputs

• Role models embedded and relevant
• Social learning/self-efficacy theory

Perceived similarity to learner (especially for
females) ? Self-efficacy
expectation capable ? Outcome
expectancy desirable
HIV/AIDS behavioural models sport
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Anything you can do
Empowering women cultural interventions

• MDG gender equality and empowering women
• Confronting traditional, exploitative and often
  abusive social relations
• Saavedra

• Peer leader roles
• Admin, management and . even ME
• Gender relations and HIV/AIDS
• Choice of sports

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Sport plus is still sport
Mastery ? performance Inclusive ?
exclusive YES and ethical sport

• Sport as aspiration symbolic mobility
• Elite sportspeople as real, embedded role models
• Norway Cup
• MYSA, KCCC and Go Sisters

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Sport-in-development and maturing partnerships
The best thing that happened

• Sports evangelists, NGOs and a new
  colonialism?
• a western hegemony of institutions and
  structures Saavedra

Donor ? instrumentalism ? altruism ? recipient
needs
Shift in (sport) aid paradigm VSO ? local
capacity building
ME accountability and/ or development?
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Putting the right foot forward
complex systems thrust amidst complex systems
We mount limited-focus programs to cope with
broad-gauge problems. We devote limited
resources to long-standing and stubborn problems.
Above all we concentrate attention on changing
the attitudes and behaviour of target groups
without concomitant attention to the
institutional structures and social arrangements
that tend to keep them target groups.
Weiss (1993)
Paradox of empowerment Mwaanga Empowerment
Through Womens Football
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MYSA citizenship and civil society
Fairplay Code proper behaviour respect for self
and others

• Ethical sport
• Only captain can speak to officials
• Offenders ? yellow card ? referee 10
  junior games
• Green card ? educational scholarship
  points

• Education and aspirations
• Points for both sports and community projects
• ? grant paid to school tuition fees.
• Educational scholarships to stay in school

• The Clean Up
• Community service
• Environmental awareness
• League points

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Its more than a game Beyond participation
?? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Research free zone
Inputs
?
Outputs
? Sporting
inclusion Traditional SD
Equity ?
Sporting Outcomes
Skills, rules, ethics

? Theory of change ? Theory of change ?
Theory of change
?
Intermediate impacts Personal/social
development/attitudes
? Intermediate outcomes
Behaviour
? Strategic outcomes
Community regeneration/social capital
Conflict resolution
Sport plus?
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Putting the right foot forward
Poverty is not simply a quantitative or
economic phenomenon, but indicates a particular
location and experience of being human. Kotze
(19933) refers to the all-embracing nature of
poverty in the sense that it encompasses
material, social, physical and intellectual
insecurity .
Burnett (2001) to establish the value-added
dimension of the impact on the community
(represented by social networks, institutions and
groups) and on the individual.
complex systems thrust amidst complex systems