Funded by French Development Agency (AFD) through La Guilde under “Impact 2024 International”, our organisation implemented a two years project titled “Youth Sports Centered Approach as a Tool to Promote Sustainable Development in the Refugee Camps and Host Communities”. The project was implemented in Nakivale Refugee Settlement and the surrounding rural communities in Isingiro District-South Western Uganda. The project used sports platforms to establish side-entrepreneurship clinics alongside the pitches, these clinics were used as spaces to train and equip 1988 refugee and non-refugee adolescents and youth with marketable and employable vocational skills like liquid soap making, bakery, charcoal briquettes making, African crafts making, weaving among other skills in order to promote their employment and sustainable livelihoods hence contributing to (SDG 1). The project also used sports platforms to conduct 48 intercultural and interreligious dialogues sessions reaching 1920 refugee youth from different nationalities, with different cultures and religious identities and also among the refugee and host community populations, this contributed to SDG 16 by building peace and promoting social inclusion and cohesion in the refugee camp and host communities. Gender equality was also promoted across all project activities especially through engaging young girls and young women in sports programing by allowing them to contribute towards the designing of the project and empowering them to lead sports activities through implementation, monitoring and evaluation as well as in dissemination of project results. This contributed to SDG 5.
SDG3 was promoted through implementing structured sports activities to improve on the physical and mental health of the vulnerable adolescents and youth. Along the pitches, we also established side health clinics to provide platforms to promote awareness on mental illnesses and educate adolescents and youth about mental health and HIV prevention. The same side clinics provided platforms to conduct mental health screening and referral of those beneficiaries who were detected to have major and minor mental disorders to access further screening, care and treatment.
As part of promoting environment and climate protection (SDG 13); this project used the sports platforms to educate 1542 young people about environmental protection and climate change. With support from Go Green, the project planted trees along 4 pitches/playgrounds to restore the environment. Through the project’s efforts to promote quality education among the refugee and non-refugee adolescents and youth, we were able to support the integration of sports into educational curriculum in 7 primary and 8 secondary schools within the refugee settlement and host communities hence contributing to (SDG 4), this was done to continue promoting sports for social good and improve on the quality of education for young people.
The intercultural and interreligious dialogues promoted social values such as friendship, respect, social inclusion/bonding and living in a resilient and diversity environment among the refugees and non-refugee adolescents and youth. This activity helped in promoting peace building, rejecting of extremism and embracing diversity in the refugee settlement and in the host communities (contributing to SDG 16). The dialogues have helped to reduce the tensions/conflicts between the refugee and the host community youth and reduced of radicalization that would result into violent extremism which is conducive to terrorism. The dialogues have also promoted team work and corrective problem solving skills among refugee and non-refugee adolescents and youth hence promoting determination, courage and inspiration towards achieving inclusive sustainable development in the refugee and non-refugee communities.
While conducting these dialogues with the beneficiaries, the project used the six phased model of dialogic process for beneficiaries to; (1) get to know each other (2) discover their biases, fears and taboos, (3) identify their differences and conflicting issues and dialoguing on their knowledge differences on violence and violent extremism and how to prevent it and also dialoguing on nationality, cultural and religious differences and promotion of inclusive societies among other topics, (4) outline commonalities and disagreements between them, (5) lay out the plan of concrete action and (6) maintain the dialogic relationship among the group members/attendees. This model helped to bring the youth together and making them to understand, appreciate and respect each other regardless of their differences and empowered them to continue carrying on voluntary community based interfaith and intercultural dialogue outreaches as well as implement sports activities to act as a platforms to educate other youth about preventing/countering violent extremism which is conducive to terrorism.
