| |
Communication and Development through Sport
By Alice Riis Bach
Photo by Børge Nommensen
| |
 |
The UN coordinator of the Year of Sport, Michael Kleiner, made an assessment of the UN Year of Sport. He listed the following reasons to use sport for development projects: |
- Sport attracts people. People who would otherwise not be attracted to development projects can suddenly be reached by the sport activities. That counts for people at all ages.
- Sport allows for a progressive implementation. It is possible to vary the pace at which sport is introduced.
- Sport is something that already exists. Sport has huge communication potential. Sport allows us to use the communication potential and touch a lot more people.
- Sport can keep young people away from drugs, crimes and prostitution.
- Sport helps to promote gender equality.
- Sport helps to promote equality for minority groups.
There are fifty national committees for sport and physical education in countries all over the world and several hundred big or small projects has been reported to the UN Year of Sport office in Switzerland. |
| The Local and Global Language of Football |
 | Jürgen Griesbeck presented the story of the German organisation Streetfootball World. He is the founder and managing director of Streetfootball World. The basic idea behind the organisation is using football as a tool to stimulate communication, learning to encounter new rules of the game, conflict resolution, joy and have fun. |
Griesbeck emphasized that it is very important to know the game of football, to know how to work with football, and to know how to benefit from the potential of football in communication, when organising Streetfootball in order to change dynamics in the groups of crime and violence. The motivation for playing football made the youngsters accept the rules. They understood very quickly what was going on when Griesbeck asked them to go to the other end of the city to play against those whom they perceived as the enemy or people they had never seen before. They were given the confidence that nothing would happen concerning their social recognition or concerning their physical security. They showed up because it was football.
Streetfootball World is now a worldwide network that offers local organisations a platform to develop Streetfootball. The German government supports the network and initiated Streetfootball for Tolerance in the federal state of Brandenburg, sending out a clear signal against right wing extremism. |
| Giving a few Afghan women a ticket to the Olympic games in 2004 |
 | Susanne Blomqvist is the former project coordinator for Right to Play, Afghanistan National Olympic Committee. She presented her experiences from her work in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her work focussed on creating training and exercise possibilities for a handful of Afghan women, so these women could improve their physical shape and athletic skills. |
The women were selected to participate in the Olympic games in Athens 2004 as athletes representing Afghanistan. This was a demand from the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The security situation and obtaining access for the women into the stadium in Kabul were difficult problems, but in the end they managed to give the women the opportunity to exercise at the stadium. Blomqvist concluded that things are very difficult in Afghanistan. The participation of a few Afghan women at the Olympic Games in 2004 seemed to have benefited the IOC more than it did the development of girls' and women's opportunities for physical exercise and sport in general in Afghanistan. |
| Hope and development through cultural activities and sports for all |
 | The fourth presentation was made by Kenneth Nkomiro, project manager for Recreation for Development and Peace (RDP) in the northern part of Uganda. RDP is a joint partnership between the Danish Gymnastics and Sports Associations (DGI) and the Danish Association for International Co-operation MS Uganda. |
Nkomiro argued that sports and cultural activities for all are important in order to develop resources in environments suffering from a twenty year long civil war with disastrous consequences and tremendous poverty.
RDP does not cover the entire districts of Masindi, Nakasongola and Apac in the northern part of Uganda, but it works in selected sub-counties. The total coverage is about 50,000 people, which is a very small percentage of the population of Uganda (27 million). RDP is also organising sport and cultural activities in the four camps built for the Internally Displaced People (IDP) in Apac. These people have been displaced as a result of the civil war.
There is an great need for the kind of work RDP is doing but RDP does not have the capacity to reach out to everybody. However, through the many volunteers and the structure RDP has established it tries to share the information. But it is also a question of money as RDP needs to coordinate the activities, to train the instructors, and there is a need for a minimum level of logistics.
Some of the tools used by the RDP are youth leader education, youth training, management training, empowerment through participation, solidarity activities, exchange visits, use of internet etc. |
| Debating democratic structures - in and outside sports organisations |
Blomqvist argued that there is a lack of democratic structures in Afghanistan also when it comes to sport and physical education and especially women's rights. Nevertheless, the lack of democratic processes can be found in the large national and international sports organisations as well. The development of democracy, dialogue, transparency and equal rights are not values practised by the international sports organisations. It is a well known fact that the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the IOC both suffer from lack of democratic structures as documented by British journalist Andrew Jenkins and others. For instance, the Danish member of IOC Kai Holm was not elected by the Danish athletes or people, but has been appointed directly by the IOC itself like all the other members of IOC.
This paradox of course has a contradictory impact when projects are created in co-operation with these organisations in order to improve the development of democratic structures, dialogue and transparency - not to mention women's rights. Even the Danish sports organisations are not managed in a way that allows for equal representation of men and women even though they are financed by the Danish government.
Just speaking about these values can be perceived as criticism. As Nkomiro pointed out: "When you are talking about values like good governance, democracy, transparency and you are building a civil society organisation, you build an organisation that is critical to the government and that is one of the potential threats we face. Though we talk about these values in the perspective of our sports groups and our organisation, we find that the government and security agencies sometimes have a lot of interest in this."
Of course, the media represent an important structural part of democracy, but according to UN coordinator Michael Kleiner the media are not at all interested in covering sport and development projects. Yet media attention is necessary for public interest and fundraising and is therefore important for the UN organisations. |
Photos: Kir Klysner |
| Lack of project measurements - and scientific research |
Griesbeck emphasised the need for quantitative measurements of the Streetfootball World and other development projects in order to show that the projects are relevant to the economic sector, health sector and other sectors in society.
Evaluating the long-term impact of sport and physical education is not an easy task but a necessary one, and researchers and project staff ought to give a high priority to this task.
All the projects presented and issues debated ought to be objects of research and further developed by sports researchers, social scientists and other research disciplines at the universities. The scientific research can lead to improvement of quantitative and qualitative measurements. |
 | Børge Nommensen from DGI International closed the seminar by calling on everyone to continue to communicate about sport and development. This is also an important task and may eventually lead to attention of the media and researchers.
|
 |
 |