Alive & Kicking UK

Effective preventive HIV education, targeting all young people in sub-Saharan Africa, would enable millions to avoid contracting the virus. As a non-medical alternative for delivering HIV education, sport has overwhelming advantages: it is capable of influencing young people at the individual, community and national level.

Sport brings together informal groups of the same age and gender - an ideal context for absorbing and internalising information about transmission. Sporting events raise awareness and mobilise communities. Through the media, sporting celebrities can exert powerful pressure on young people to change their lifestyle.

In resource-poor countries the national youth infrastructure - schools, clubs, CBOs and NGOs dealing with young people - is available for delivering sport-based education as an extension of their normal services. Many are already active in this field. Above all, sport has the capacity to attract the large number of volunteer health workers required to scale up preventive programmes to national level.

Read Alive & Kicking's full paper on Sport-based Health Education

Sport and Development

Find out about the growing popularity of sport as a tool for international development.