“How can we create conditions around girls where sport can become a pathway to lead into education, participation and leadership positions? This is the real question.”
Participants recognised the potential of sport to change people’s lives — developing leaders and opening doors for people who may not otherwise have had the opportunity. However, sport does not automatically invite change: it should not be treated as providing “black box” solution. To succeed, sport for development initiatives must be intentional and who designs a programme, and who decides its content, matters
Experience from a cricket programme in Cameroon offered two reflections. First, that arriving with a sport is not enough without understanding community context — parental attitudes and local barriers for example, can shape whether a programme can be effective. Second, the need to ‘zoom out’ to understand the roader societal outcomes: the real question is not only the safety of girls in a programme, but whether her participation can unlock other opportunities. Both point to the same conclusion — understanding local context requires trusting local knowledge, listening to context and putting local people in the lead.
Experience from Jamaica illustrated sport as a route out of economic hardship and poor infrastructure. Training can lead to a scholarship, but a lack of resources can also create unsafe situations, particularly for girls, making safe sport a central concern.
- Athletes often receive no nutritional or other support, and the wider ecosystem around them — agents, coaches — is often poorly trained, so that by the time an athlete reaches the podium, the hardest part of the journey is already behind her. Investment should therefore not be measured only in medals, but in an athlete’s trajectory afterwards, whether in sport, education or community leadership.
- Good practice: Pocket Rocket Foundation: A foundation, inspired by a tangible investment made in one speaker’s own education, covering education and equipment, now supports children who are largely not Olympians but active community leaders, offering evidence that tangible investment in women and girls “makes sense.”
Investing early is critical, since pathways cannot be created retrospectively. Women and girls must be involved in decisions made about them from the outset. Visibility matters, including for athletes returning to competition after childbirth, since seeing women in these positions makes it believable for others.
Meaningful participation goes beyond simply taking part: it means being a beneficiary and being involved across every angle of a programme. Citing the $2.3 trillion global sports economy discussed at the World Economic Forum, the questions were raised: what is being done with this money, where it goes, and whether it gives local communities genuine agency.
Participation can be motivated by many things, and often that joy alone is a legitimate reason for a girl to take part, but starting points may differ. Local context includes understanding what participation looks like. Can girls play safely? Are the facilities safe? Can she return home safely? Are there female coaches? Will her family accept?
The central question is therefore not whether a girl played, but what changed because she participated. This holds particularly during adolescence, a period of transition in which sport can be a strong positive influence, including in refugee contexts.
A shortage of appropriate infrastructure and trained coaches as a persistent barrier. Coaches do not need to be former athletes — teachers were highlighted by participants as an underused resource.
- Good practice: Qatar Foundation’s flagship program, Creating Pathways, provides a clear progression route for girls to move from their first experience of sport into structured development and high-performance competition. The program combines talent identification, coaching, and development opportunities with strong connections to the wider sporting system, creating clear and sustainable pathways for girls to remain engaged, develop their skills and advance their sporting ambitions.
The discussion widened to the broader ecosystem around women’s sport, questioning how many photographers, videographers, journalists and contract negotiators working in this space are women.
- Good practice: Programme run by FIVB: Photographers were expected to visit a public school, but none were available from the school or community. A girl from the community was asked to take the pictures herself, with good results — illustrating that a safe sport environment can open doors for girls in roles beyond athlete, without needing external expertise/cost brought in.
Financial sustainability was raised as a recurring concern: sport – for development works best, and lasts longest, when designed with the discipline of a sustainable business model rather than relying solely on external funding.
Public-private partnerships-collaboration between governments and the private sector is key to unlocking sustained investment in women’s sport combining public reach with private resources and grounded in local needs.
- Good practice: Work by the Yunus Centre pointed to three critical windows across an athlete’s life course where investment matters most: early adolescence (10–14), when participation and confidence begin to fall; the transition from school to livelihood, where sport can bridge into employment; and the transition out of competitive sport, where female athletes often reach the end of their careers with discipline but little network or income to build a second livelihood. Yunus Sports Hub’s Athlete Business Accelerator is working to close this gap.
“Access without safety is not access at all. It simply shifts the risk onto the girls we are trying to reach.”
A girl who plays sport is more likely to stay in school and to develop confidence carrying into the classroom, family, workplace and community. Women globally remain around five percentage points less active than men, and the WHO finds 85% of adolescent girls do not meet global activity guidelines, compared with 78% of boys. UNESCO estimates 49% of girls drop out of sport during adolescence — six times the rate for boys — precisely the age at which early marriage, domestic labour and unsafe journeys to school also begin pulling girls out of education. Yet the sector remains better at telling compelling individual stories than at providing funders with rigorous, comparable data on outcomes and cost.
Duty of care goes beyond safety measures and policies. It is about creating a culture of safety, where women feel protected, respected, and able to speak up. This means embedding care into everyday practice, leadership and behaviour, so that safety is lived rather than a tick box exercise.
Local and cultural context was raised repeatedly as decisive: what works in one region can differ significantly from another, and models cannot simply be transplanted between contexts.
- Good practice: In Kenya, building the necessary sporting ecosystem required leadership expertise, and it was considered important that this role be filled by a woman, given the lack of historical female leadership and need for safeguarding women in the sector.
- Good practice: A rugby programme in Fiji uses the country’s national sport to prevent negative behaviours among youth, and challenge gender stereotypes through a 50/50 gender parity policy to normalise women in sport leadership roles.
Local context is essential to defining outcomes and correctly interpreting data on monitoring, evaluation and learning. The need to better articulate the broader societal impact of sport through more comprehensive metrics and storytelling was highlighted by participants as essential. The most influential figures in an athlete’s development are often not the athletes themselves but those who work with them, such as coaches, and the most consequential moments come early, before an athlete reaches their peak. This points toward investing and focusing effort at grassroots level, rather than concentrating resources at the elite end.
“I don’t want the next generation of girls simply to see women succeeding in sport, I want them to grow up expecting women to be the people making decisions about sport, and I want them to see themselves in those roles.”