Measuring What Matters in Sport for Development

Sport-for-development programming is easy to run and hard to evaluate. A football league that keeps teenagers in school, a netball programme that builds girls' confidence, a community tournament that brings rival neighbourhoods together for an afternoon — the value of this work is rarely in doubt to the people delivering it. The evidence base behind it, across much of the continent, is thinner than it should be.

Part of the problem is methodological. International frameworks exist — UNESCO's Kazan Action Plan follow-up work and the African Union Sports Council's continental pillars both set out what sport-for-development programming should be aiming at — but translating continental indicators into something a district-level programme can actually track, on a modest budget, with a small team, is a different and harder task.

It matters because the organisations running this work are usually answerable to donors and government partners who reasonably want to know what changed, not just what happened. Attendance figures and photographs of smiling participants are not evidence of outcomes in health, education, employment, gender equality, social inclusion, peace building or disability inclusion — they are evidence that an event took place.

This is the gap ASLPC's Division C is working to close: a Uganda Sport-for-Development policy and impact framework that adapts established international indicator methodologies to a Ugandan context, developed through cross-sectoral pilot partnerships rather than in the abstract. The goal is not more paperwork for programme staff, but a shared, credible way to say — with evidence, not just conviction — what sport-for-development work in Uganda is actually achieving.