Shaping the Sport for Development Agenda Post – 2015

How can sport as a tool for social change become the global development success story of the 21st century?

In order to scale its impact, we will all need to be, think and act differently. We will need to recognise the inter-dependent nature of actors working across diverse sectors and adopt more evidence based and data-driven decision making. We will also need to efficiently share the many ‘ideas worth replicating’ across our sector. We believe that sustainable development will only come from a commitment to continuous learning about what works and by developing new and better solutions, including those that address the ‘system’ as a whole. Individual organisational leadership is a pre-requisite, but doing many of these things together is the only effective route. For many organisations, collaboration will require a quite different mind-set and skill set.

At inFocus, we hope 2016 will lead to more coordinated and deliberate actions that put theory into practice. We don’t pretend to have a complete road-map. But, we do hope that the paper we have developed will help stimulate some further debate, particularly concerning how the field might continue to develop and increase its role in society. We hope our findings provide some direction for individual S4D actors, networks and collaboratives that are considering how to scale-up their own social impact. We consider the content a ‘work in progress’ and invite your feedback to improve the proposed approaches and ultimately to fine-tune the strategies during 2016.