Planning for success and to achieve social change using sports

Changing the way how we look at sports and development will open the path to tackle new challenges of the century, discrimination, gender equity and racism.

There is a lot of knowledge on how to develop sports projects in harsh environments and under-developed communities, but we must focus on the strategy behind those projects. The COVID-19 pandemic gave us time to rethink and observe how plans can change and be adapted to new situations. No one would have thought that a global pandemic could bring the world at halt for so long, but the important fact here is how social sports organizations adapted to continue developing their programs with success.

To achieve global goals, we need to go one step further and think outside the box, if we want to enhance sport as a tool for real social development. It is in knowing the values that sport brings to the larger community as well as the opportunities it provides to marginalised sections of the society. In order to obtain a real change in society through sport, we need to focus more on long-term strategies with specific objectives in mind. Here are 5-key principles that one must keep in mind for a good strategy that will lead us to reshape the future of sports and development:  

1. Contextualize the background by getting an overview of the sports, education, economic and health situation of the community where the project is going to be developed.
2. Analyse in detail from a qualitative and quantitative perspective the main needs of the community to create a project that solves a real need.
3. Set long term goals for the project. What do you want to achieve in five years with the development of the project? Also, set short terms objectives with key performance indicators for each year or semester, depending on the length of the project.
4. Develop the main activities of the project by including local people and partnering with the key stakeholders to obtain a better result.
5. Monitor the development of the project by revising if the key performance indicators are being achieved. This observation can tell us whether the strategy needs to be changed or not.

In the end, all organisations plan their strategies in their own way, but if the sport and development sector can get a comprehensive understanding, it would be easy to get the right results and, therefore, help us achieve and promote these sport-based development programmes to the community.

An added value to strategic planning is the use of digital technology. It will give value to the project by creating a professional communication channel that will allow sharing of qualitative knowledge. We need worldwide awareness about these projects to connect and help communities.

The most valuable way to reshape sports and development is to make it more professionally sound by giving importance to the processes of planning ,since planning goes before acting. A small step taken towards strategically thinking about the project’s aims and objectives can help us achieve greater professionalism and create a clear path to follow.

The formula for sports and development to pass into action is to have a vision for the future, linking the mission with the specific objectives, monitoring and evaluating the strategy and reviewing the goals progressively.

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Andrea Flores is a Project Manager at Itik Consulting Sport & Leisure, and an individual change-maker that volunteers in social sports projects for disabled people, locally with ADISGA and internationally this summer in ANOPA.