5th Commonwealth Sports Ministers Meeting

Dr Gill, I add my warm thanks to you; and Honourable Ministers, I add my warm welcome to you.

I am delighted to be here, alongside Deputy Secretary-General Mmasekgoa Masire-Mwamba.

I begin by nailing my many colours to the mast...

As an Indian citizen, I am familiar with a flag that is orange, white and green, but I address you under the blue and yellow ‘hedgehog’ of the Commonwealth emblem, as a servant of 54 countries on six continents, and of two billion people: a third of humankind.

I also address you as an avowed sports fan: one who occasionally managed both runs and wickets in his day, as well as cleared a few hurdles; and one who now turns as readily to the back pages of a newspaper as to the front, if he wants to be in tune with what most inspires and excites him.

Our 5th Commonwealth Sports Ministers Meeting today is less about performance sport, and the Commonwealth Games.

And yet, of course, the connection is inescapable.

We meet not a mile from the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium, having gorged on the great spectacle that was yesterday’s opening ceremony.

It is indeed the opportunity provided by the Games which has brought us together.

What a journey has been made, to reach this point.

We know well that it has not been without incident, and – where things have gone awry – lessons will no doubt be learned.

But let us simply offer congratulations: as I said in my piece in The Times of India a fortnight ago, the Games Organising Committee and the Ministry of Youth and Sports, working alongside the Commonwealth Games Federation, have literally and metaphorically moved the earth to make this happen, and we acknowledge this fact.

May ‘the Friendly Games’, as they have come to be known, be a beacon for this family of nations, and the world.

It all began in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1930.

Some of us remember Roger Bannister and John Landy running the ‘miracle mile’, in Vancouver in 1954.

We first took notice of ‘Kip’ Keino in Kingston in ’66.

It was a 13-year old Canadian, Alexandre Despatie, a diver, who became the youngest ever Games champion, at the first ever Asian Commonwealth Games, in Kuala Lumpur in ’89.

Then there was Ian Thorpe in Manchester in 2002, butter-flying his way to six swimming gold medals.

Performance sport has other heroes as well.

It can and does capture our imagination, and let us hope for a feast for the eyes – and nourishment for the soul – from what we see in the next two weeks.

They said it at Ancient Olympia the best part of 3,000 years ago, and I say it now: ‘let the Games begin’, and ‘let them be a great success for Delhi, for India and the Commonwealth’.

And may the 80-year relay continue: let Glasgow soon grasp the baton, and run.

But if our meeting today is not primarily about performance sport, and not about the Commonwealth Games, then what is it about?

Let me give just one illustration from many – one which is dear to me, and which I have shared before.

I think back to a Commonwealth Sport Development Conference in Glasgow – where I first saw film footage of mixed teenage football on a dirt field outside a village in very poor, rural Kenya.

It was a scene of ragged t-shirts and bare feet; not of loud, hologrammed and logo-laden team strips, and garish pink boots.

But there were teams, rules, goalposts, crowds, and above all coaches, parents and mentors.

Some of the interviews afterwards helped to illuminate the powerful truth that those boys and girls were doing much more than playing football together.

They were learning to respect each other, and to see each other as equals, whose educational opportunities, and gender rights, and health entitlements, and professional prospects, should be the same.

All this, from the simple act of training and playing regularly in the same football team, and knowing the lessons and rewards of honourable sporting competition.

That is simply my own illustration of ‘sport for development’, and ‘sport for all’.

Each of you will have you own.

I believe your task as a community of Sports Ministers is to establish the transformative development power of sport – and not just to have the right things said about it, but to have them done.

You have a head start: as a community, you have already met four times since Manchester in 2002.

You have the Commonwealth Advisory Body on Sport, chaired by Bruce Kidd of Canada, a speaker today, who succeeded Sue Campbell of the UK a year ago.

Bruce, I should tell you, is a Commonwealth gold medallist: he won the 6 mile race in the Games in Perth.

However great an advocate for sport for development now, he is still no stranger to performance sport himself.

You also have the third of our Sports Development Advisers in the Commonwealth Secretariat.

With UK and Australian funding, the first two were UK citizens.

Now, as the host of the current Games, India has generously seconded us Swaran Singh Chhabra, also here today, from the Indian Ministry of Youth and Sports.

And we look to this tradition being confirmed in 2013, as we seek to bolster the development legacy of each and every Commonwealth Games.

Not only do we have a sports community which can meet as equals and exchange ideas, but we have the best practice to share.

CABOS has produced two very powerful volumes of ‘sport for development’ case studies, which are available on the document table.

But we can and must and will do much, much more.

I am conscious of the danger of purveying rhetoric when we need to equip ourselves and yourselves to face – and to make – reality.

So this meeting is about that reality, and planning our next steps.

We will hear from partners, and I am especially pleased that we will discuss the work of the UN programme of Sport for Peace and Development.

But I attach the greatest significance to the work that the Secretariat and CABOS can do for you and with you, in four key tasks.

First, we would want to see sport established as an element of the work of our Commonwealth Youth Programme – 36 years old; overseen by the Youth Affairs Division in London and coordinated in four Regional Centres in Georgetown, Lusaka, Chandigarh and Honiara; and nothing less than a global leader in the fields of youthworker training, ‘youth voice’ and national youth planning, and youth enterprise.

The links are obvious: indeed, many of you preside over Ministries of Youth and Sport – and our last Commonwealth Youth Ministers meeting (in Colombo, two years ago) underscored its own desire further to integrate sport.

Second, we would want to see sport established as an element of the work of the Commonwealth Secretariat, beyond the Commonwealth Youth Programme.

The obvious areas are health, gender and education, but there are more: democracy and human rights, for a start.

Third, we would want to see sport established as an element of the work of each and every member government in the Commonwealth.

We call it ‘mainstreaming’, by which we mean that Ministries of Youth (or of Education, or of Health), should have policies and programmes – and pennies to match – for integrating ‘sport for development’ into their work.

It was at the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (in Port of Spain in November 2009), that our leaders formally committed to ‘mainstreaming’ youth.

In other words, what would the Ministry of the Environment say and do about youth – or the Ministry of Enterprise – or the Ministry of Health?

So now we want to ask the same questions of sport, and to produce for you (on the basis of solid qualitative and quantitative research) a guide to mainstreaming sport, which we hope to present to you when next this community meets, in the margins of the London Olympic Games in August 2012.

And today, again, you will start to hear how this can be done.

Fourth, we would want to start a planning process, working together as member governments and the Commonwealth Secretariat, to set measureable targets in the priority areas of sport for development.

From the Millennium Development Goal Review Summit in New York last week, we know the value of identifying and being accountable to transparent targets.

One candidate target would be a percentage of children and youth actively engaged in sport and physical activity, for example, or the percentage of children actually receiving physical education as part of basic education.

Setting the targets will mean a collective exercise in reviewing where we are today, and how we can ambitiously but realistically move forward.

The targets can only be set in consultation, with governments, the UN and more, and they may have to be country- or region-specific.

With your support, I will direct the Commonwealth Secretariat to start the planning and consultation process as soon as possible.

We can deliberate further on them at the next CSMM in London.

Distinguished colleagues, these, I think, are four sound and achievable priorities we can embrace.

Today, we will start to hear and discuss how they can be met.

At the outset I said that this Meeting is not about the Commonwealth Games, but I readily acknowledged that it is they which have allowed it to happen.

So now, at the end, I return to the Games, and say to Mike Fennell and the Commonwealth Games Federation that while we recognize your primary responsibilities are for high performance sport and for the staging of these Games, we hope that future Games will be able to contribute more to the tasks of sport for development.

This can happen in ways that work for the Federation, whose autonomy, of course, we respect.

We know that this has begun to happen, and that you have ready and willing partners.

The last three Games bids have earmarked funds for each other Commonwealth country, to train and support the teams of athletes which it brings to the Games.

At something like $7 million, this is a huge and a magnanimous commitment.

The challenge is to ask whether that goodwill can go considerably further than the top athletes, and bring sport to ordinary citizens in cities, towns and villages all over the Commonwealth.

This would of course be a magnificent and visionary goal.

We would encourage prospective bidders for future Games to indicate how they might do this, and we would encourage the Federation to take those proposals into consideration.

I close by repeating that sport must bring its rewards to all: to athletes with neither shoes nor shirts, and to young boys and girls in this country and in other continents and oceans, who can come alive through sport, and learn many of life’s lessons.

Let us look further at the dividends of sport, and celebrate its ability to instil teamwork, aspiration, effort, social cohesion, gender equality, healthy competition.

Let us grasp how it can develop individuals, groups of individuals, and even entire communities.

Let us see sport as a way to advance health, education, rights, wholeness, democracy and community spirit.

In this, let the Commonwealth lead the field.

ENDS