As Paris hosts the 38th Olympic Games, nearly 1,000 African athletes will participate in the competition, 20% more than 4 years ago. While they brought back 37 medals from Tokyo, including 11 gold, many more – around fifty – are expected in Paris. African athletes are now performing in more and more disciplines other than athletics, such as taekwondo and cycling. Alongside the middle-distance runners from East Africa (Kenyan master Eliud Kipchoge) or sprinters like Botswana’s Letsile Tebogo, much was expected from the Burkinabe triple jumper Hugues Fabrice Zango, the Ivorian taekwondo champion Cheikh Cissé Sallah and the Eritrean cyclist Biniam Girmay. In team sports like basketball, South Sudan’s Bright Stars arrived in Paris in force after upsetting Team USA. There are also all those athletes of African descent who compete under the flags of Western nations. While some were born and raised in those countries, many have recently migrated from Africa to benefit from better training conditions.

It is indeed always a challenge to be a top athlete in Africa. The financial efforts of the International Olympic Committee do not solve the structural problems of African sport, pushing most African athletes to leave the continent, such as the Ivorian triple continental champion Marie-Josée Ta Lou, or the world record holder in the 100 meters hurdles, the Nigerian Tobi Amusan. Usually, these expatriates blame the lack of infrastructure and mentoring programs, the difficult reconciliation with professional life and the costs of training.  Of course, Africans are not the only ones, like the new French Olympic swimming champion Leon Marchand, who trains in the United States. However, exile from African countries is often permanent and ends with a change of nationality. African performances do not reflect the true value of the continent in world sport.

The Africa and sport story is a paradox: on the world’s youngest continent (70% of its population is under 30), there is not enough exercise: 1 in 4 African adults (22%) and 4 in 5 students (85%) do not do enough sport, and 200,000 deaths per year are attributed to physical inactivity. Moreover, while the global sports industry is growing rapidly, a recent survey revealed that a large majority of industry stakeholders noted that the sector was “underdeveloped” with deficits in data, public strategy and private investor mobilization.

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To change the situation, it is crucial to understand that sport is not just a hobby or a physical practice. It is also a development tool, a business opportunity and a “soft power”.

Recognized as a key enabler of sustainable development by the United Nations 2030 Agenda, sport is considered capable of achieving at least 8 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals: eradicating poverty and hunger, providing education for all, supporting victims of disasters and emergencies, promoting gender equality and combating disease. Beyond declarations of intent, sport is a public policy shaped by UNESCO, the United Nations lead agency for physical education and sport. With its flagship initiative “Fit for Life (F4L)”, a global alliance aimed at mobilizing financing for sport for development, UNESCO targets priority areas around youth, gender, cultural diversity, traditional sports and games, values, education and employment. Sport is also one of the objectives of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and its Sports Council.

The importance of sport as a tool for development has, however, been belatedly recognised. It all started in 2014 with Olympic Agenda 2020, which encouraged cities to include economic and human development in the organisation of the Olympic Games. More and more major sporting events must be climate-friendly (via infrastructure) and focus on human rights, including gender equality, children’s rights and workers’ rights. From safety standards to press freedom, sport is aiming to be more humanistic.  From the 2008 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, human rights communities are increasingly mobilizing on human rights issues, pushing sports organizations to adopt more aggressive policies, such as FIFA’s human rights strategy, adopted in 2017.  In the process of selecting the host cities for the 2026 World Cup, which was finally awarded to Canada, Mexico and the United States, FIFA included the issue of human rights for the first time. These principles will resonate strongly in Egypt if the country is selected to host the 2036 Summer Olympics, as they did yesterday in South Africa, the only African country to have hosted a mega sporting event, the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

With billions in revenue, more infrastructure and visitors, South Africa has also proven that sport can be a business opportunity. Of course, sport has never developed a country on its own, but it can be, combined with a dynamic market, a viable export sector. With $512 billion in 2023, the sports industry is expected to reach $624 billion in 2027. In Africa, if the contribution of sport to African GDP is more limited (0.5%) than elsewhere (2%), the market is one of the most dynamic with an annual growth of 8% over the coming years.  It has already reached $12 billion and could reach more than $20 billion by 2035. The arrival of the NBA in Africa with the Basketball Africa League (BAL) represents a first recognition. With an African middle class estimated at 1.1 billion people by 2050, the continent, increasingly urbanized and connected, is a leading market for the expansion of a local sports industry, which suggests that African talents will no longer have to leave their country to succeed.  There is no doubt that the major sporting events to come on the continent will generate increasing economic interest, such as the Youth Olympic Games 2026 in Senegal, and Morocco co-hosting the Football World Cup in 2030.

However, Africa remains the only continent that has never hosted the Olympic Games since its launch in 1896. It was not until 1904 that African participants took part, with two South African runners, Len Tau and Jan Mashiani, at the Olympic Games in Saint-Louis, and in 1960 with the Olympic Games in Rome to see a first African victory, the Ethiopian Abebe Bikila, the gold medal barefoot. Since then, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa have been the major African nations at the Olympic Games.

The limited number of African Olympic nations is not surprising. To be able to compete with the best and retain its talent, Africa needs a stronger programme, which covers all dimensions of sport, from schools to national teams.

First, it is essential to include sport in educational systems and even make it an innovative educational tool. The revival of school sport requires having school federations capable of organizing regular sports competitions within local leagues, at the elementary, middle and secondary levels. Because sporting excellence can lead to academic excellence, sport is also likely to support the schooling effort, in particular by making any subsidy to training centers conditional on the compulsory schooling of young athletes.

Of course, the issue of developing sports infrastructure within schools is crucial. Infrastructure is also a relevant tool for correcting regional inequalities by allowing populations in urban areas and rural areas to benefit from it. It is also relevant to mobilize sport as a tool to combat gender inequalities: it is indeed well known that sports practice delays the entry into marriage of African girls.

Beyond these aspects, it is the entire financing of African sport, still too dependent on States, which must be rethought in order to better include the private sector. The State, for its part, would be called upon to promote investments through a more suitable tax and regulatory framework. Concerning the high level, rather than abandoning athletes to their own devices, the creation of a national training centre, like the French Insep, would allow athletes to benefit from more favourable preparation conditions.

Foreign clubs, which would continue to host the greatest African athletes, could be called upon to support the development of African sport through a more substantial financial contribution. Because not everyone can be Victor Wembanyama or Prince Tega Wanogho, these funds could then be used for training in other sporting professions (advertising, sports medicine, journalism, fitness, etc.).

Well structured, sport is a powerful tool of soft power, as demonstrated by the rivalry between the United States and the USSR, the instrumentalization of sport by China during the 2008 Olympic Games, or the great aspirations of countries like Saudi Arabia.

In Africa, the Olympic Games have always been an opportunity for African countries to speak out louder than in the UN. For example, they boycotted the Montreal Olympics in 1976 to protest the presence of the New Zealand All Blacks, who were returning from a tour of South Africa, a country banned from the Olympics because of its apartheid policy. At the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, to celebrate South Africa’s return, the 10,000-meter finalists, Ethiopia’s Derartu Tulu and South Africa’s Elana Meyer, hugged each other.

Beyond the Olympic Games, Africa has hosted some of the most powerful events in sporting history such as the iconic boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, “The Rumble in the Jungle” on October 30, 1974, in Zaire, or the “One Team, One Country” show of unity orchestrated by President Nelson Mandela at the Rugby World Cup on June 24, 1995, at Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg, as South Africa celebrated its first major sporting event since the end of apartheid.

The unique issues surrounding sport make it a major geopolitical issue that decision-makers should integrate into their foreign policy, whether at the bilateral or multilateral level. On the continent that is home to the world’s youth, it is, more than anywhere else, the symbol of the vital momentum of a People already engaged in the coming century.

By Rama YADE
Africa Director
Atlantic Council
Former Sports Minister in France