Commonwealth Sports Ministers Meeting
Date: 9 Aug 2008
Speaker: Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma
Location: Beijing, China
Ministers, Delegates. It is a special pleasure for me to participate in my first meeting with Ministers of Sports of the Commonwealth.
Sports is an area of Commonwealth activity to which I attach very great importance, because of its enormous potential as an influence on positive and cohesive transformation of our societies, and particularly on the self-esteem and self-belief of our youth.
I offer my sincere thanks to Minister Ellis, to her team, and to ABT, the event organizers, for the tremendous job they have done in making this meeting happen. I also extend my sincere thanks to you all for assembling here. We number some 40 Commonwealth Sports Ministers and 110 other delegates: this is an exceptional gathering of talent and responsibility.
It is a chance for us to celebrate sport for sport’s sake: each of us is passionate about one sport or another, and will be cheering our own country-folk here in Beijing, just as we will cheer all who perform well and with good spirit.
But it is also a chance to celebrate sport as something which can change people’s lives. It can make them - and the societies they live in - healthier, wiser and happier and their societies more integrated and attuned to achievement. It can bring people closer to other people whom they would know better, and advance respect and understanding. That is the power of sport, and we in this room have the power to maximize the power of sport.
Sport has been and always will be an expression of important truths about individuals, communities and nations. Our Commonwealth Games are an expression of what binds us together: language, traditions, institutions, and above all the values of freedom, democracy and development; of supporting the poorer, the weaker, and the smaller among us; of being joined together as partners and as equals.
When our Commonwealth leaders met in Malta at the end of 2005, 53 countries formally endorsed the power of sport. I quote from the CHOGM Communiqué: ‘Heads of Government underlined the important role of sport as an effective instrument for community and youth development, in terms of building character, discipline, tolerance and friendship, promoting fair and open sporting competition, protecting the integrity of young athletes, and in creating broader opportunities for socio-economic development in the Commonwealth.’
This is the belief which informs our meeting.
In Glasgow recently at the 2nd Commonwealth Sports Development Conference, I
made several observations. In brief:
First, sport is a subject like any in the classroom – it teaches learning, and it raises self-esteem, self-confidence and social cohesion.
Second, sport is good for girls and women, as well as boys and men, and thus to my mind a gain of the highest value in our societies.
Third, sport embraces all, in that it can include those who might otherwise be excluded.
And fourth, sport is a means to develop a healthy life, both individually and collectively.
In Glasgow we looked at many case studies on each of these points. One in particular that struck me was a programme of mixed-sex teenage football. Its messages were simple and its findings remarkable. It started from the fact that part of the AIDS problem revolved around boys thinking they can use girls. What was lacking was respect. Yet seeing just how good the girls are at football built that respect, and brought with it a new code of sexual manners. It was powerful testimony of sport as something far more than 90 minutes’ worth of passing the ball.
The Commonwealth has put its belief in the power of sport into practice.
We now have this formal community of Sports Ministers, who have met three times in the margins of Commonwealth and Olympic Games.
We have established the Commonwealth Advisory Board on Sport so ably led by Sue Campbell. Two years ago, CABOS assembled a superb body of evidence from five continents, on the best ways that sport can transform societies. It has now produced an excellent follow-up volume, which is amongst our papers today. CABOS has ideas and reach – it needs to continue to exert its influence and support to all of us.
We have also run individual sports and development projects. We have successfully funded experts to work in four of the Regional Anti-Doping Offices, set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency. We will talk about this at Item 6 of the agenda today.
Meanwhile, at the grass roots, we have seen sports as an important element in the Commonwealth Youth Rehabilitation Centre in Gulu, Northern Uganda – a centre we have set up to bring young people out of the trauma of conflict and into the mainstream of everyday life.
There are other activities, too, and one in particular is run under the auspices of the Commonwealth Education Trust. It is a project which is measuring the impact of sport and exercise on young children’s health, happiness and academic performance. I commend it to you: it’s called the LOOK project – Lifestyles Of Our Kids.
I also believe strongly in collective reflection on how we can enrich and enhance the legacy to our societies as well as to our common purpose from the huge investment of political commitment, time, finances and energy, which the Commonwealth Games represents
Ministers, we now need to change gear. We need to establish once and for all the close links between sport work and youth work, both in the Commonwealth Secretariat and with you, in your Ministries in the 53 countries of the Commonwealth. This is the message carried by the Secretariat paper you have before you for Agenda Item 2.1.
One aspect of that paper – and of the Communiqué– is that Sports Ministers may consider adopting the same policy recommendations that your counterpart Commonwealth Youth Ministers adopted when they met in Colombo in April. You have those points in front of you.
The second is that we want to establish a Sports Adviser position in the Secretariat, as part of the Youth Affairs Division. I ask for your support for this and also for you to agree a novel way of funding it – a way which has, in fact, already been unofficially in place over the last three years, thanks to the generosity and far-sightedness of the Australian and UK Governments, as the holders of the Commonwealth Games in 2006 and 2002. As part of the legacy of their own Games, they have funded, on a part-time basis, our sports adviser in the Commonwealth Secretariat. We now seek this funding full-time as part of the commitment of those that host Commonwealth Games in future.
It will be the logical conclusion, and optimum practical platform, for bringing sport into the mainstream of the Commonwealth. It will allow us to link Sport with the work of one of the jewels in the Commonwealth crown, the 40-year old Commonwealth Youth Programme which is active across four continents. It will enable us to look more ambitiously to what we can do with sport as the agent of enlightened social transformation and nation-building.
So these are, for me, some of the issues we need to discuss and agree today. Sport is our bond: it was Nelson Mandela who said that, “Sport speaks to people in a language they can understand”. But sport is more than that: far away from the Olympic Games and the medals, in field or back-street football or cricket or netball or whatever it may be, it represents the human potential of our constituents. The CABOS report puts it well: ‘Sport for development’. Thank you.
ENDS
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Commonwealth Sports Ministers Meeting
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