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Sport for development starts with leadership skills training
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Can sport really contribute to development? Inemarie Dekker from svikaworks argues that it does - by building leadership skills amongst youth and enabling them to take control of their professional lives.

It starts with the love of sports
Mutare Haarlem Sportleaders

(MHS) in Zimbabwe started more than 10 years ago with sport leadership skills training. Sport leadership is about learning by experience, namely the skills and technique as a player and/or coach, the rules as a referee and the leadership qualities needed to lead a team. 

What’s more, future sports leaders have acquired on the job experience by founding and leading sports teams and  organising community sports activities in their neighbourhoods, which at the same time provided leisure for local children. 

Altogether, it has built a strong basis for sports leaders who are passionate about their jobs. This is exactly what ensures the quality of S&D programmes.

Sport addressing social issues
Many S&D programmes use sports to address social issues, such as health education on HIV/AIDS, female empowerment and peace-building. MHS also started sports programmes to address social issues, but only once it had developed a basis of good sports leaders.

These social programmes resulted in more women attending sports activities and female sports leaders becoming role models for other girls. It also resulted in more acceptance of disabled children. Still, it is hard to give exact facts and figures. For example, was it really the result of the Kicking Aids Out! activities (one of MHS' activities) that the level of awareness around HIV/AIDS increased in Mutare, or was it due to all the other health care programmes? Could it also have been a result of a combined effort?

These types of questions, left unanswered, leave many with a scepticism that sports programmes cannot be that important for development.

The end  result is leadership skills
More important than sports for social goals are the skills that sport leaders learn along the way. MHS’ sport leaders have grown as sports players, learnt life skills and developed a healthy life style, but they have also developed themselves as leaders.

They are not only as coaches on the pitch, but also in their personal lives. Most of the sports leaders have a job, set up a business or have taken up a formal study, which is an incredible result in a country with a formal unemployment rate of over 95%.

I believe it is the leadership skills learnt through sports that have helped them develop the self-confidence needed to find opportunities and to act on them. 

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