Peace education through sport: Examining the significance of sport in Development (original) (raw)

Sports is increasingly being adopted as one of the strategies in international development with an aim to promote peace building iniative in many post conflict zones and developing countries. Given its potential to develop individual life skills and the community at large development organizations are increasingly integrating sports in their project work in order to improve their programme delivery. This is a result of an agreed understanding today that organized displines or activities are a potential source or platform for youth positive development (Larson, 2000). Among popular organized activity today, sports provides an opportunity for youth engagement (Larson & Verma, 1999). Internationally, the United Nations General Assembly in 2003 adopted a resolution affirming its commitment to sport as a means to promote education, health, development and peace. It was also generally agreed and recognized that sport and physical education are tools that can contribute towards achieving the internationally agreed development goals. The year 2005 was also declared a year of Sport and Physical Education by the United Nations while encouraging development stake holders to seek ways of using sport to promote peace as well as in the effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Sport was recognized as a vehicle for “addressing global issues related to violence, inequality, disease, hunger, primary education, environmental sustainability and global partnerships (Mandigo, Corlett & Anderson, 2008: 110). Available evidence suggests that sport integrated with in the development component can be a medium to promote education, development of life skills among participating young people, promoting peace building and conflict prevention, disaster response, disability inclusion, health sensitization, economic growth, and gender mainstreaming. However whereas sports has these development aspects, there is an ongoing debate on whether participation in sport activity promotes peace or violence?; Does it bring about desired social change?. Whereas there is limited data on sport in development and its actual role in peace building, there is growing recognition of the role it can play in the development and this necessitated the need to mainstream sports in peace education. Sports is a low cost, high impact and transferable medium of engagement1, it‟s a tool that can be used in peace education since it brings people together in a joint endeavor. Through sport participation, self generated change and dialogue is promoted among participants through their engagement. Individuals learn and adopt skills necessary to engage in dialogue in any conflict situation. Sports as a pedagogy can be significant in peace education. This module paper intends to examine the pedagogical benefits of sports as a tool for peace education particularly its significance in development today, citing Right To Play project in Uganda as the case study. The paper will also examine peace pedagogy and pedagogical theories, the learning process theory and the theory of change to explain why and how sport as pedagogy. can play a significant role in fostering behavioral change and development of life skills key to peace and development in society. The paper also highlights some counter arguments to the growing notion in favor of use of sport in development. However for clarity to avoid ambiguity between the terms sport and physical education and the lack of a systematic or international agreement on a preferred term, in this paper I will mainly refer to the term sport in examining its significance in development.