Dr Ben Farai Sanders is the Executive Director of the International Platform on Sport and Development (sportanddev). He leads the operating team and accounts to the sportanddev Steering Board who appointed him as Executive Director to sustain, strengthen and scale the reach and impact of sportanddev.
Ben directs the massive open online course (MOOC) on Sport for Sustainable Development, developed with the Commonwealth Secretariat and Australian government, which has attracted over 10,000 learners from 200 countries and counting and been translated into French, Spanish and Arabic. He co-authored a guidebook Bridging the Divide in Sport and Sustainable Development, available in English, Spanish and Japanese.
Born in Zimbabwe and bred in Cape Town, South Africa, Ben's passion and expertise is in sport for development and peace. He has supported sportanddev since 2018, and has extensive practical and theoretical experience, including working with the United Nations, Commonwealth, FIFA, Laureus and many others, in designing, delivering and evaluating policies and programmes that use sport to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
He completed the first PhD by publication in Sport for Sustainable Development in Africa in 2017 and has published academically and presented widely. He has extensive management, strategy and leadership experience in the non-profit sector, public sector and international development cooperation and is proudly South African.
Ben is a Research Associate at the UNESCO Chair for Sport, Development, Peace and Olympic Education, the first in Africa, and a Scientific Committee member of the UNESCO Chair on Sport for Development, Peace and Environment.
"Ben offers the unusual combination of extensive practical experience in delivering sport for development programmes and in-depth academic reflection. He exhibits Gramsci’s advice to radicals – to combine optimism of the will with pessimism (or at least scepticism) of the intellect. Such informed reflection makes for good practice and informed theory." (Professor Fred Coalter, Visiting Professor at Free University of Brussels and Leeds Beckett University)
