Football is survival here

Background

Sport plays a significant role in poor areas like Zambia and football in particular is an activity which most boys and girls practice and can relate to. As part of NIF's Norad funded Africa project, the Under 14 boys team from the Breakthrough Sports Academy in Lusaka participated in the 2004 Norway Cup under the name "Kicking Aids Out" having qualified as winners of a nationwide tournament in Zambia the year before.

Purpose/objective

To gain knowledge about how African players, coaches, families and sports organisations experienced their participation in the Norway Cup.

Methodology

The project was a pilot and included qualitative interviews and conversations with players and their families in their home locations in townships in Lusaka, November 2004, 3 months after their journey to Norway and the participation in the Norway Cup. Findings are contextualised through interviews with several sports NGO's operating in Zambia and in Lusaka, the capital, in particular.

Key findings

The cultural exchange which the Zambian boys took part in in connection with the Norway Cup 2004, had given them a great experience. The stay in Lusaka was too short (2 ½ weeks) to conclude in definite and general ways about the possible effects of their Norway Cup-participation. On the basis of the interviews conducted among players, coaches and parents/families there was little doubt that the players had appreciated meeting kids from all over the world during the tournament in Oslo. However, there were several practical matters during their stay in Oslo that they were unhappy about. They complained about tasteless and bad quality food (dry bread/hot dogs w/mashed potatoes). The coaches were unhappy about accommodation outside the city, long travels by public transport and having to rearrange a friendly game versus Beijing in order to participate in a cultural event. There had been internal problems and conflict of interests also between the Zambian leaders during the tournament and problems of a patronising and at times an arrogant host organisation were presented as major concerns during my interviews with the involved leaders.

The parents of the boys had very mixed opinions, but all of them carried a wish which appears to be incongruent with the non-elite focus of the Norway Cup tournament; they hoped that Norway Cup would provide a springboard for their child towards a career as a professional footballer in Europe. It is difficult to see how participation in Norway Cup way had effected their lives in a township in Lusaka, where they all live in homes with no running water, no electricity and in breif very challenging circumstances. This is a highly intangible issue which it is hard to measure. The question whether the money could have been better spent through contributing towards improving the local sports structure instead will probably be a recurring one. What remains certain is that for the boys at the Breakthrough Sports Academy it had been a fairly challenging travel from a world where football is seen as a survival strategy to a world they are otherwise shut out from, a world where football is a pastime and not a survival strategy.

Recommendations

Need to enhance and coordinate international critical, research based evaluations of sport and development projects, with a particular stress towards strengthening the north-south cooperation between academic institutions within the field of sport and development research.