The Journal of Sport for Development is delighted to announce Dr. Katherine Raw has been selected as the 2024 JSFD Early Career Scholar Award recipient. The annual award, established in 2019, recognizes an early career JSFD author in recognition of significant scholarly contributions to the sport for development field.
As sport for development and peace (SDP) initiatives have become more prominent, external stakeholders have adopted unrealistic expectations for program outcomes and funding models. Organizations are often left competing with other grassroots SDP organizations for grants with resource-affluent funders since funding streams have not kept pace with the growth of the field. Although some funders have begun adjusting their approaches, the purpose of this research note was to further explore how practitioners themselves perceive that funders can better support SDP efforts. Open-ended survey responses from grassroots leaders (n=122) highlight a need for long-term funding opportunities, investment in capacity building and overhead expenses, consideration of local contexts, strategic approaches to innovation and entrepreneurial pursuits, and improvement regarding trust and power dynamics.
In this paper we explore the extent to which visual data collection methods, such as drawings and videos, can contribute to studying how vulnerable children benefit from participating in sport for development (SFD) activities. We first highlight the limitations of traditional data collection methods (e.g., surveys and interviews) in assessing the potential impact of activities on the well-being of children participating in SFD and then explore opportunities arising from integrating digital data formats that facilitate data collection methods for monitoring, evaluation, and research. In this context, we present a framework to illustrate how visual methods could be applied to collect and analyze the impact of an intervention. By capturing individual, relational, and institutional benefits that children gain from attending sports activities, this framework provides one example of how the positive impact of such activities can be systematized in a way that provides empirical evidence to support the multidimensional effectiveness of using sport as a tool for development. While recognizing their advantages, the paper also acknowledges areas of caution and potential limitations associated with visual data collection methods. The aim of our paper is to illustrate the potential of a tool that SFD practitioners can use to systematically collect and analyze visual data for assessing the impact of an intervention.
Journal of Sport for Development 