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More than 140 delegates from 42 countries met for two days under
the 55 meter high dome of a magnificently restored 16th Century
Amsterdam Church to celebrate the recent huge strides made in using
sport as an international development tool, and to plan greater
cooperation and partnerships as more national and international
development agencies realize the full potential of sport as a tool
for social and youth development.
Hosted jointly by the Dutch Government’s Ministry of Health,
Welfare and Sport and the Netherlands Organization for Development
and Cooperation, the conference brought together international development
agencies and sport groups from both the developed and developing
countries in a series of working meetings.
In the opening plenary session speakers from the Dutch Government,
and UNICEF highlighted the new role that sport was playing in international
development. “Five years ago you could not have held a conference
like this” said a Dutch government representative, “there
just were not that many people around who understood the value of
sport as a development tool.” She went on to say, “The
Dutch Government has committed one million Euro in 2004 in the lead
up to the Athens Paralympic Games. The money will be used to promote
‘Five-a-Side” a football (soccer) variation that sees
five visually impaired athletes taking to the field. Funding will
be used to help developing countries learn the sport, and bring
teams to the Paralympics. The highlight of this activities will
be just before the Paralympics when a team from one of the developing
countries will take on an all-star team from world able-bodied soccer.
And we expect the developing countries to win.”
Following the plenary session, working groups were established and
they worked for two full days to prepare a final report to be taken
back to the closing session. Different working groups considered
5 separate but interlinked topics:
Because of my background, I was assigned to the Sports and persons
with disability group, and when we made our presentation at the
end of the two days, there was consensus that we had captured the
key elements of all the other groups – since the problems
and solutions for using sport in international development for persons
with a disability are essentially the same as for the other groups,
but with the added difficulty of overcoming the problems of exclusion
from education and employment of persons with disability that is
still found in many developing countries.
Everyone at the conference was assigned to a working group, and
stayed with that group for the majority of the workshop; the purpose
being to try to get detailed and specific descriptions of best practices
in each of the workshop areas. In our workshop, we heard about the
success of Wheelchair Tennis’ programs in countries such as
Sri Lanka, and of the innovative work being done in sport through
the integration of individuals with physically and intellectual
impairments in Bolivia.
Facilitated with skill and enthusiasm by Mike Zuijderduijn,
our Dutch workshop leader, we progressed through a series of in-depth
exercises to identify the conditions that would lead to success in using
sport in international development to advance the lives of persons with
disability. Our working group’s final presentation will be available
on the ICSSPE web site, for those who are interested, and the Conference’s
final report will be available on-line sometime in early 2004, and interested
readers should check the English language website www.sportdevelopment.org/nextstep.
Our “expert working group” had participants
from every continent except Antarctica, and between us we had representatives
of donor and recipient countries, program planners and administrators,
front-line program delivery practitioners, and representatives of International
Development Agencies and the International Paralympic Committee at both
the administrative and elite athlete levels. It was a wonderfully diverse
group, who shared a passion for working with (and also included) persons
with a disability, and who worked well together over a long series of
sessions that lasted well into the night, and which slowed down only slightly
during meals. Our conclusions
Our group concluded that for international development to be successful
in helping persons with a disability in developing countries, there
needed to be well designed programs of intervention, and policy
development, delivered in an environment that facilitated the full
societal involvement of persons with disabilities, while being supported
with appropriate physical and human resources.
The Next Steps International Expert Meeting: Sport and Development
was an overwhelming success, both at the official, organizational,
level where the meeting objectives were more than met, but perhaps
even more so at the personal level. For many of those present it
was a revelation to find that they were not working alone –
that there were like-minded individuals around the world working
for the same goals and with much the same methods. New alliances
were formed, new projects initiated, and new joint ventures proposed,
and participants returned to their countries with a renewed sense
of purpose, and a commitment to make more and more national and
international policy makers aware of the major positive impact that
international development through sport could have on the youth
of the world – in both the developed and developing nations.
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