"People Have a Right to Participate in Sport"

Gerald Guskowski, head of the GIZ’s sector programme "Sport for Development", talks about challenges and perspectives.

Before taking on his new job, Guskowski worked for GIZ in South Africa in the context of the “Youth Development through Football Programme”, an initiative that uses football as a tool to overcome discrimination, improve health and combat disease, promote gender equality, fight violence and secure environmental sustainability. Under consideration of the upcoming "Communities and Crisis" seminar, ICSSPE conducted an interview on the potential of sport for development purposes.

ICSSPE:  How can sport be incorporated into development cooperation initiatives in order to contribute to reducing social and economic problems?

Guskowski: Sport can contribute to achieving various development goals and objectives. To mention just a few:

- Sport plays an important role in education. Girls and boys should have access to sport in school and after-school programmes, as well as access to out-of-school sport programmes. It should be ensured that a quality sport programme is in place to enhance the acquisition of diverse life skills. Governments should ensure the sustainability of programmes and should be aware of the need of implementing quality programmess, which means to have qualified coaches and teachers.

- Movement and sport can support the prevention of diseases because healthy lifestyles are mostly intrinsic to sport (excluding high performance sport). Thus sport can be used to pursue development goals in the health sector.

- In many countries young people leave school without any realistic employment prospective. These youths form a group that can be easily attracted by crime, violence or drug abuse and therefore form a risk for society. Involving these youths in sport as coaches or participants can offer them meaningful activities. They can learn and gain respect from society working as coaches, for example, coaching younger children and teaching them important skills.

- Sport is part of civil society. Thus the support of sport structures is simultaneously a support of the development of a strong civil society. This in turn is part of good governance programmes in development cooperation.

- So far only few hosts of major sport events have achieved sustainability beyond the hosting of the event itself. Economic, green, social and political sustainability are topics of development cooperation. Therefore such sustainability can be a topic for development cooperation.

ICSSPE: How can sport be utilised particularly in crisis areas? And which skills are required to work in a post-disaster setting?

Guskowski: Sport can create a neutral space for encounters aside form crisis areas and political commotions. It can support overcoming social, cultural and religious differences. Sport is important in these areas to distract people, particularly children, from bad experiences, to give them back a piece of “normality”, to help them overcome trauma and to provide them with new perspectives. In crisis areas on the one hand you need experts in the field of crisis management and peace building and on the other hand experts who are aware of the outstanding impact of sport and physical activity for children and young adults. The aim is to link these two topics into one project to improve the work in post-disaster settings.

ICSSPE: How can sport contribute especially to inclusion, participation and gender empowerment processes?

Guskowski: First of all, people have a right to participate in sport. Therefore, it is an objective to provide such access to everyone. Access to quality sport programmes should be provided in particular to women, disadvantaged children or people with disabilities in societies where this access is not available. Sport can then give disadvantaged people the chance to learn and become part of something. This in turn enables empowerment, which can lead to success in other areas of life.

ICSSPE: What is the current situation of the “Sport for Development and Peace” movement? How do you think will it develop? Where are its limits and prospective?

Guskowski: On the one hand, there is still a lack of methodology: what is good quality school sport? How can we make maximum use of sport encounters for violence prevention or peace development? How can we provide sport for girls in strongly religious societies? How can we support the development of civil society structures in sport (going beyond national federations)? Then, we have to avoid stereotypes: Sport is not good per se. An unqualified coach can support the development of negative values. Therefore, we have to identify the relevant positive factors and support those. At this point, scientific research does play an important role.

ICSSPE: Why should international development agencies include sport programmes? How should they be implemented and where is further collaboration between governments, NGOs and corporate actors necessary?

Guskowski: We should support sport programmes because we can use them to achieve development goals. The variety of actors in the sport field offers opportunities: Development cooperation can work together with federations, sport clubs, NGOs, the private sector, and, last but not least, governments, coming up with innovative solutions to development programmes with a multitude of stakeholders. Development cooperation, in turn, can use its world-wide presence to support the sport sector, provide its networks and communication channels for the successful implementation of programmes particularly with regard to the sustainability of programmes.

ICSSPE: What do you consider the role of academic actors to be in this context? How important is research and education?

Guskowski: Academics can analyse the impact of programmes and use the findings to improve their quality. For that reason they are needed for highlighting new perspectives and for developing effective methodologies to implement within sport development programmes.