In 1997, Luke Dowdney bumped into a young man carrying a Colt AR-15 rifle as he came round a corner in Rocinha, a favela in Rio de Janeiro. “It was an awkwardly polite moment,” Dowdney recalls. “I said sorry and he said sorry and then I walked on.”
The sight of a young man, probably 15- or 16-years-old, armed with a weapon designed for military combat, is not uncommon in Brazil’s poor and disenfranchised urban communities. Drug-related violence can make daily life can feel like a war zone. “The homicide rates are off the scale. An estimated 15,000 young people are armed and in drug factions,” explains Dowdney, a British researcher and amateur boxer. So in 2000, Dowdney founded Fight For Peace to offer young people an alternative to the violence.
Projects like Fight for Peace that seek to use sports to achieve social objectives –poverty reduction, conflict resolution, gender empowerment or youth development – are growing in number and popularity. The London 2012 Olympics prioritised inspiring young people through sport and as a result, the International Inspiration (IN) coalition was formed. Other large organisations such as Standard Chartered, Barclays and Nike have started or funded projects, joining a slew of grassroots initiatives (Grassroot Soccer, The Jala Pelo Foundation or Women Win) and those started by sporting bodies such as Fifa.
But despite the enthusiasm, there is still precious little evidence of long-term impact. Can sports for development (S4D) meet its goals or does it just provide much needed, yet temporary, relief to people who have the odds stacked against them? Dowdney is in a good to position to answer that question; his organisation is 15 years old, practically old hat in this nascent sector.
“I was doing my masters in social anthropology and came to Recife [in north-east Brazil] to work with street children,” says Dowdney, whose organisation has now reached 250,000 young people and trained local partners in 25 countries. “They all sniffed and sucked industrial glue which would put holes straight through their teeth. Yet despite the activities we ran with them, they never seem to put the glue down.”
He describes starting a conversation with a boy who, once he heard Dowdney was a boxer, asked to be shown a few moves. “By the time I’d shown him the basics the other children had gathered around us. I noticed they had all completely forgotten about the glue.”
Explaining why boxing could do what other activities couldn’t, Dowdney says: “Boxing creates access for the kids to come to you. It creates a relationship between boxer and coach that is about discipline and respect; it is an individual sport – your success is dependent on you – but it’s also a team sport as young people train together and support each other. And it’s respected. We put on boxing shows that traffickers leave their weapons behind and come to.”
“It connects with the most marginalised people that government policies cannot reach. If you tell these young people: ‘Here’s a classroom, go and learn or here’s a job, go and work,’ they don’t want to know. That’s a world they don’t understand.”
Being able to reach people is one of the real strengths of S4D and it’s not limited to boxing. At a recent event at Wilton Park about using S4D as a catalyst for change, participants shared stories of success from London to Lusaka, citing a range of sports including cycling, football, rugby and cricket.
The story of Tsepo Nyirenda, a young man from Diepsloot, a township in northern Johannesburg, who competed in – and completed – the Cape Epic mountain bike stage race and got a job as a trainee chef in a prestigious restaurant along the way, is probably one of the most inspiring examples of the power of sport. In Diepsloot, rape, unemployment, drug abuse and violent crime are a part of daily life. But it is here that the Diepsloot Mountain Bike Academy, of which Nyirenda is team captain, is providing young people an opportunity to build self-confidence and gain the skills to succeed in education and the workplace.
But encouraging young people to achieve extraordinary feats is easier, it seems, than convincing parents, policymakers and funders that S4D is more than just fun and games. In India, one organisation, Magic Bus, no longer makes explicit mention of sports, choosing instead to say that they develop an “activity-based curriculum”
And, like most others NGOs and civil-society organisations, charities in the S4D sector struggle to secure long-term funding and so diversifying income streams is key for their sustainability. Kick4Life in Lesotho has morphed from a simple S4D charity into a football club whose players compete in the country’s Premier Soccer League and Africa Cup of Nations. The social enterprise also runs a restaurant, hotel and conference centre.
“NGOs have to take more responsibility for finding more income streams,” says Dowdney. Speaking of his own organisation he adds: “We started a clothing business that I sold to Reebok and now we receive a percentage of their revenue for Fight For Peace activities.”
But even when organisations have figured how to go from a social club to a genuine bridge to further education or employment, and even after a clever financial plan has been conceived, there are still factors outside of organisations’ control that limit just how much S4D programmes can do and how transformative they can be. As Dowdney puts it: “There is no quick fix for youth unemployment, violence, bad public facilities or culture.”
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