Gender, Sport and Development
Budapest, Hungary
December 2006
Martha Saavedra
Contemporary Moment
• Sport and Development
– Surging popularity as a tool
• 2005 – UN Year of Sport and Physical Education
– Embraced with enthusiasm by many
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Sport Federations
Corporations
NGOs
Athletes
In the North and South
http://www.unicef.org/sports/
Sport and Development
Selected Projects in Africa
Moving the Goalposts, Kilifi
CHILD - Christian Home in Liberating Destitute
Maendeleo ya Michezo (Tanzania)
Sport and Development
• Projects are emerging all over the place…
• Exemplifying contemporary global networking possibilities –
they are not limited to official or established channels.
Kirinyaga, Kenya, 2006 – Andrew Papworth was a short term volunteer with the Kirinyaga Sport
Foundation – an NGO established by Edith Munubbe, a retired school teacher and widow.
Linked by advocates to the
8 Millennium Development Goals
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
2. Achieve universal primary education.
3. Promote gender equality and empower women.
4. Reduce Child Mortality.
5. Improve maternal health.
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
7. Ensure environmental sustainability.
8. Develop a global partnership for development.
And with
Peace, reconciliation and post-conflict healing
added in for good measure.
Sport and Development
Kofi Annan
Adolf Ogi, former President of
Switzerland, Special Adviser on
Sport for Development and
Peace
Djibril Diallo, Director, UN New
York Office of Sport for
Development and Peace and Sepp
Blatter, FIFA
Gender, Sport and Development
• My project – preliminary thoughts & provocations
– Contextualize and Assess SAD
• Highlight the larger historicized framework
• POV - critical development and gender studies
– Evaluate specific programs and projects
• ‘Best’ approaches and practices
• Political and institutional location, opportunities and constraints
– Advocate
• Am not be unbiased objective observer
• Am involved in SAD (Toolkit, Sport and Development Platform,
Corporate social responsibility, University-based service learning)
– Africa centered, but not limited
Gender, Sport and Development
• What I want to emphasize
– GSAD is hard and serious work
– Doesn’t take place on blank-slate
– Requires several areas of knowledge
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Local – language, culture, history, geography
Sport-specific – love of sport isn’t enough
Organizational, business, managerial & entrepreneurial skills
People skills – it is all about the people involved
– Is inherently political, and thus potentially contentious
and risky
• Resources are being mobilized and created for change (a la
CLR James), hence this is about Power, and
• Disrupting current distributions of power.
Gender, Sport and Development
• Case study in progress –
– Moving the Goalposts, Kilifi, Kenya, mtgk.org
Context - Sport and Development
• Historical Context
– Not new that sport might be directed towards achieving
ulterior social outcomes.
– History of modern sport
– Links with rise of modern state
• Concern with physicality of agents and general population
– Readiness for war
– Hygiene and health
– Sport and social movements
• Muscular Christianity
• YMCA
Context - Sport and Development
• Modern Sport in Global South
– Colonialism and Imperialism
• Used as tool of change and ‘discipline’
• Controlled to avoid subversion and resistance
• Western forms of sport were adopted, adapted, modified,
ignored and rejected by colonial subjects
– Hesitate on notion of “dissemination”
• Suggest not “disseminated” so much it as parallel emergence
as well as some visceral links with colonialism, imperialism
and global capitalism.
– e.g. high jumping techniques, gusimbuka-urukiramende and
Ernst Jokl (Bale, Imagined Olympians, 2002)
– International mode of sport dominated by and signifying the
West.
Context - Sport and Development
• Sport follows many trajectories
– local influences impact evolution of sport in
one place, later re-inscribed elsewhere.
• Still - Western hegemony of institutions and
structure remains
– though not without regular and continued
contestation.
• As such, it carries historical and cultural
baggage…
Context – some baggage at
the hegemonic core
– Gendered systems of sport in global North
• Hegemonic heterosexual hyper-masculinity
– situated within a consumerist, individualistic ethos
• Posited against any homosexual visibility
• Rules out muscular femininity
– In a binary and exclusive definition of sexuality
– Women’s pursuit of sport
• Possible, but peripheral and always problematic
• Challenge to hegemonic norms of sexuality
Context – some baggage at
the hegemonic core
– Gendered systems of sport in global North
• Hegemonic heterosexual hyper-masculinity
– situated within a consumerist, individualistic ethos
• Posited against any homosexual visibility
• Rules out muscular femininity
– In a binary and exclusive definition of sexuality
– Women’s pursuit of sport
• Possible, but peripheral and always problematic
• Challenge to hegemonic norms of sexuality
Is this true everywhere, at all times?
Sport and Development
• Reiterate
– Not new that sport should be used for social, political,
economic goals.
• Concern
– Ahistoricism of current articulation reflects an unstated
(unconscious?) assumption that sport is apolitical;
– Also reflects uncritical belief that sport is inherently
‘good’.
– Or in a more complicated iteration – ‘our sport’ is good
and can be cordoned off from that which is bad.
Sport and Development
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Problems in any argument that considers sport a
priori to be a force of good…(R. Giulianotti, 2004)
1. Functionalist – “sport meets crucial social needs”
• But sport can also be dysfunctional
2. Sport Evangelists – neo-colonial repositioning,
moving impulse from home to overseas
3. Skewed to youth (young men)– what of other
populations?
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What of women and elderly? What is addressed here…
4. Cross-cultural politics of sport humanitarianism
Sport and Development
•
Problems in any argument that considers sport a priori to be a
force of good…(R. Giulianotti, 2004)
4. Cross-cultural politics of sport humanitarianism
a. Sufficient dialogue between donors and recipients
when aid is offered?
b. Empowerment of recipients?
c. Ownership of projects?
d. Dynamics of power and meaning behind crosscultural ‘cooperation’ between donor and
recipients?
Sport and Development
• Development Aid and the Gift
– Hattori (2003)
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Reciprocity expected?
Unequal power?
Confirms status on giver?
Mechanism of consent
Affirms current logic of development assistance and
unequal relations.
– Infuse capitalist conditions with ethical meaning
– Moral regulations
Sport and Development
• “Gift” versus entertainment expenses
– FIFA’s humanitarian budget
• ₤ 907,000 (2003)
– FIFA’s budget for inner circle for six weeks in
Paris in 1998 World Cup finals
• ₤ 5,000,000.
From Giulianotti (2004)
Sport and Development
• Point on Aid in Africa in particular…
– In many global fora the African present represents what
Mathers and Hubbard have called “emaciated
modernity,” where global capitalism has failed to
transform, thus triggering sympathy, a burden of
responsibility to care about Africa and contributing to
“the ‘just’ notions of humanitarian aid and the regime
of the NGO.”
Mathers and Hubbard on Survivor Africa (2004)
Sport and Development
• Is this particularly an American problem?
– e.g., Mathers and Hubbard on Survivor Africa
• Africa is often dismissed in popular media as out of time and a failed
project. We assert, however, that Survivor Africa places an imagined
Africa as central to an emerging discourse of a humanitarian
American empire, not a footnote to it, and that the history that makes
this neo-liberal utopia possible is located in earlier colonial
representations of Africa. Although this empire of the present cites
these colonial images, it differs significantly in its mode of operation
and ideal subject. The neo-liberal utopia that seeks to mediate
America’s relations with much of the rest of the world is just as needful
of discourses of humanitarianism as the empires of the 19th
century. But while the Europeans sent missionaries and scientists to
pave the way for their commercial enterprises, Americans send NGOs
and development agencies. [2004 p. 445]
Gender and Sport outside the west
• External and Global influences –
(global does not mean external)
– Codes practiced
– Discourse, practice and policy affecting gender
• FA Ban on women’s football, 1921-1971, direct effect on
British colonies.
• FIFA and IOC mandates on gender inclusion and target
expenditures
– Corporate promotions, sponsorships and marketing
• image of female athlete, female event (Women’s World Cup)
– Corporate production – commodity chains and labor
practices (sweatshops)
Gender, Sport and Development
• Different notions of body and mind
– Value of physical activity?
• China
– Sport historically not male preserve
– For Imperial bureaucracy, elite education emphasized mind over
body
– Sport there better suited to women and lower-classes
• Sudan
– Women from good Muslim families should not labor
• Senegal – preferred female body types
– Drianke – socially powerful urban woman
– Disquette – upwardly mobile, young urban woman.
– Note: Contemporary increase in preference for polygamy among
this group in Dakar. (Mills, 2006) Another variant of third wave?
Gender, Sport and Development
• Valences are just different
– International success in sport trumps any reluctance to
honor women
• Thus many accomplished female athletes are heros in their
home-countries
– Acceptance and promotion of recent female boxing
extravaganza in Nairobi “The Africans versus the
Americans”
– Daily Nation featured many more articles on women’s
sports than average US paper. Even features on local
Mombasa Women’s Football League, in which MTG
Super team plays.
Gender, Sport and Development
• Gender not always (most) limiting factor
– Education, class, age-group, marriage status
• Female elite in Sudan – tennis, equestrian sport
– A few instances of women as referees in male sports
• Basketball, football and wrestling in Senegal
• Football in Kenya
• More then in established male sports in the US.
– Women’s basketball as one of most popular spectator
sports in Senegal.
– Likewise with women’s volleyball in Peru (previously)
Gender, Sport and Development
• Nevertheless, assuming
– At least some association between sport and
masculinity, and
– Gendered expectations that privilege male access to
organization and practice of sport
• Then, can postulate that female sport continues to
be transgressive and potentially ‘revolutionary,’
• Disrupting received notions about gender roles,
and allowing for new possibilities with positive
spillovers for women in other social arenas.
Gender, Sport and Development
Sample of projects that have explicit gender agenda
(from Sport and Development International Platform project database, sportanddev.org, accessed April 5, 2006)
Project
Education through Sport
Football, social support and peer-led health
education for rural teenage girls
Go Sisters
Organizer
LiiKe (Sports Development Aid)
Moving the Goalposts Kilifi
Education through Sport
(EduSport) Foundation
Kicking AIDS Out! (International Network) Commonwealth Games Canada
(CGC)
NOC/ADEL Project of Women’s
International Labour Organization
Cooperatives in Boane
(ILO)
Olympic Youth Ambassador Program
Lesotho National Olympic
(OYAP) - Lesotho
Committee
Play Soccer
Play Soccer
Synergy and capacity building through sport
and culture in Western Kenya
U-Go-Girl
Women in Paralympic Sport (WIPS)
Development Initiative
Danish Gymnastics and Sports
Associations (DGI)
Sports Coaches' OutReach
(SCORE)
UK
Sport
Location
Tanzania
Kenya
Zambia
various
Mozambique
Lesotho
Ghana, Senegal,
South Africa, Zambia
Kenya
Namibia, South
Africa, Zambia
various
countries in
Africa
Gender, Sport and Development
• Most projects are not just about sport.
• They have explicit goals outside of sport.
• Tackling very specific local problems.
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Poverty, un(der)employment, weak/absent infrastructure
Family dislocation/dysfunction
Illiteracy and/or Schooling obstacles
Sexual violence (rape, incest)
Child labor/human trafficking
STIs, HIV-AIDs, other diseases
Drugs – use and trafficking
Limited rights and/or limited knowledge of rights
– War, famine, environmental degradation, etc.etc.
Gender, Sport and Development
• Mobilizing people and resources through sport –
presumed mechanisms of change:
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Awareness via themed tournament and other events
‘Captive’ audience for add-on events
Capacity building through organizing sport
Life skills through practice of sport
Health benefits through practice of sport
Demonstration effect - Tunaweza!
• Especially valuable in changing essentialist perceptions and
assumptions (about gender, able-bodiedness, caste, class, etc.)
Gender, Sport and Development
• Case study in progress –
– Moving the Goalposts, Kilifi, Coast Province Kenya
Kilifi, Kenya - context
• Kilifi, north of Mombasa
– one of the least developed districts in Kenya
– Around 8% are infected with HIV/AIDS, higher than national average
– 66% of the population live below the poverty line
(MTG 2005 Annual Report)
• Population – mostly Mijikenda, also Swahili and other ethnic groups
– Mijikenda – family power lies at intersection of patriarchy and
gerontocracy
– Patrilocal, with polygyny possible
• Wives move in with husbands extended family on homestead
– Senior male elders control major resources
• Land, trees, household property
– Married women under direct control of both patrilineage elders and their
wives.
– Women’s usufructory rights to land and some tree crops
• increasingly circumscribed by scarcity and adoption of individualizing
principles of national land tenure reform.
(Ciekawy, 1999)
Kilifi, Kenya - context
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Economy – Agriculture and Tourism
– Agricultural production doesn’t produce enough income
• Women - agricultural labor
– Most households reliant on wage income of young and middleaged men
• Generational struggles between men common
– conflict often deflected onto women, especially younger women who
have married into group.
– Women’s cash income options
• Rural based women have few opportunities to earn cash income.
• Rural-urban, urban women without education: sell vegetables or palm
thatch in market, maids, construction, prostitution
(Ciekawy, 1999)
– Holiday destination for foreigners and wealthy Kenyans
Kilifi, Kenya - context
• Current conditions of poverty
 stress on families
– Dislocated, dissolving
– Dysfunctional
– Pervasive sense of precariousness of survival
• This stress may account for
– Extensive (increased?) domestic and sexual
violence (a research question)
– Alcohol related abuse
Kilifi, Kenya - context
• Education
– Primary school is free, but
• You must pay for
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Books
Uniform
Food
Transportation
– Secondary school is not free
• Most are boarding schools
• Cost is out of reach for many families, even if girls
do pass exams with sufficiently high scores
Kilifi, Kenya - context
• Women’s power is circumscribed
– Early marriages and teenage pregnancies are common for young
women
– Teenage girls show the highest rates of new HIV infection in
Kenya
– Poor women in Kilifi District have the lowest rates of both literacy
(26.8%) and school enrollment (54.4%) in Kenya.
– There are very few women leaders and decision makers in Kilifi
(MTG 2005 Annual Report)
• Although
– Women do voice their complaints and can use gossip and
divination among other means to address their concerns.
– Historical role model?
• Mektalili, female diviner and leader of 1914 Giriama war against the
British colonialists
(Ciekawy, 1999)
Moving the Goalposts
• History
– Begun in September 2000 by Sarah Forde Owuor, and
local educational and development officers
– From 1 to 5 staff members in 2005, including a project
coordinator with extensive development experience.
– Significant volunteer work from advisory board, UK
based supporters and from participants themselves.
– Funding from Ford Foundation, Plan International,
Alistair Berkley Trust among others.
Moving the Goalposts
• Focus –
– Mobilizing and empowering girls
and women through football
– Developing their self-esteem,
confidence teamwork and
organization skills
– Peer education on reproductive
health and problem solving
– Capacity-building in community
through developing skills of
individuals
By MTGK photographer, Salma Ali
Gender, Sport and Development
• Major problems as identified by girls
– Identified in informal conversations
• How to find school fees
• Necessity of bringing home income to share with
family
• Eating – Where will their food come from? (lack of
cash to eat out or provide for themselves)
– Issued raised during MTG visits to schools
• STI’s, wife beating, rape, incest
Moving the Goalposts
• Program
– Football
• Teams, leagues, tournaments and commemorative events
– Organized by girls committees
• Training referees and coaches
– Peer Education and mobile video shows
• Topics
– Reproductive health
» Adolescence
» Menstruation
– HIV-AIDS and STIs
– Decision making, Assertiveness
– Problem-solving
• Girls develop skits, poems and raps to deliver message
• Training in public speaking
Moving the Goalposts
• Program - continued
– Community involvement
• Volunteering at orphanages
– Monitoring and Evaluation
• Participatory, emphasis on process, though
outcome is important
• Life Stories project
– Organizational, Business, Management Skill
Development
• Training (peer education, office and computer skills,
curriculum development)
• Volunteer work experience with MTG, in field, in office
• Educational support (beginning)
Moving the Goalposts
• Outcomes
– Survived 5 years and has grown
• Increased number of players and teams, sustained
league play, formation of super team, media
exposure, newsletter, web-site (www.mtgk.org)
successful fund-raising, developed robust governing
structure and volunteer network
– Participatory M & E process currently
underway: Impact of specific programs
Moving the Goalposts
• Challenges
– Working with current infrastructure
• Transportation (!!!!!)
– Difficulties in carrying out daily activities, practices, games, peer
education
– Cost, reach, reliability, safety
• Kenyan Football Federation
– In disarray
– Few options for girls who want to continue with football (and they do!)
– Other NGOs entering field
• Collaborators?
• Communications?
– Communications by and with girls
• Confidence increased locally and among themselves, but not
necessarily in other settings
• Their expectations – dependency syndrome
Gender, Sport and Development
• Reiterate what I want to emphasize
– GSAD is hard and serious work –
• mundane and banal is important
– Doesn’t take place on blank-slate
– Requires several areas of knowledge
•
•
•
•
Local – language, culture, history, geography
Sport-specific – love of sport isn’t enough
Organizational, business, managerial & entrepreneurial skills
People skills – it is all about the people involved
– Is inherently political, and thus potentially contentious
and risky
• Resources are being mobilized and created for change (a la
CLR James), hence this is about Power, and
• Disrupting current distributions of power.
Gender, Sport and Development
And it is underway and going to happen
regardless…
New sports project in Kirinyaga, Kenya (Central Province).