Sports for Adolescent Girls

This 4-page brief summarises discussions at a meeting of the Interagency Youth Working Group (IYWG), where sports programming was highlighted as an innovative approach to protecting and empowering girls. According to the brief, sports can help build social networks for girls in developing countries, allowing them to challenge gender norms that contribute to their vulnerability. In addition to promoting gender equity, sports can enhance physical and mental well-being; promote social integration for girls; provide girls with adult mentors; and encourage the development of new skills, knowledge, and self-confidence.

The brief explains that many HIV prevention programmes are beginning to incorporate sports as a platform for disseminating HIV prevention messages and for teaching life skills that help adolescents change their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours regarding HIV. More than ever, international policies support the participation of girls in sports programmes, and sports advocates are incorporating more health and development goals into their agendas.

The document looks at a selection of published studies that have shown that sports can have a positive effect on the knowledge and attitudes of both adolescent boys and adolescent girls, with promising results. For example, a recent evaluation of an eight-month AIDS education intervention programme called EMIMA, which used peers as soccer coaches and sources of HIV/AIDS education for at-risk adolescents in Tanzania, found that the programme was effective in improving knowledge and attitudes about HIV and safe sexual practices. A school-based pilot project in Zimbabwe showed that professional soccer players can be effective role models and HIV educators. Using an interactive game-based approach, soccer players taught an HIV curriculum (developed specifically for the study) to about 150 seventh-grade girls and boys over a two-week period. When compared with a control group of students who received traditional school-based HIV education, the students in the intervention group were significantly more likely to believe that condoms can effectively prevent HIV and to know where they could find HIV prevention services.

Additional research is beginning to show that participation in sports may have a positive effect on sexual behaviours, in addition to knowledge and attitudes. In a study published in 2002, scientists investigated the relationship between sexual health and membership in voluntary community organisations such as churches, youth groups, and sports clubs in South Africa. The study included a survey of more than 1,000 men and women ages 13 to 60 living in a small mining community near Johannesburg. Although the results were mixed depending on sex, age, and type of community organisation, the scientists found that young women ages 15 to 24 were significantly less likely to be infected with HIV if they belonged to a sports club than if they did not. This did not hold true for young men of the same age (although young men ages 20 to 29 were significantly less likely to be infected if they were in a sports club). More recently, the International Centre for Reproductive Health and its partners published the results of a cross-sectional survey assessing relationships between sexual behaviour and membership in the Mathare Youth Sport Association (MYSA). Results showed that MYSA members were significantly more likely to report condom use with their current or last partners.

Recommendations outlined in the brief include:

• develop programmes that ensure girls’ physical, emotional, and sexual safety and protect their reputations, honor, dignity, and marriageability;
• engage parents and other community members early in programme development, to ensure support and to increase the programme's impact and sustainability;
• design programmes that aim for sustainability and the prospect of scale-up;
• gather and incorporate better data on programmatic measures of success, which can strengthen a programme's sustainability, improve its design, and inform scale-up;
• embed sports-related questions into adolescent health surveys and other sources of data;
• consider ways to identify which interventions work best rather than just which oneswork or do not work; and
• experiment with combinations of sports models and programme content, in diverse settings and venues, with a broader range of programme implementers.