Sport for development, explained without the jargon

"Sport for development" describes using sport deliberately as a route to something else: school retention, health, employability, leadership, or simply a reason for a young person to be somewhere safe with adults who know their name. The football is real. It is also the door.

Its strength is attendance. Programmes that young people are made to attend struggle. Programmes they want to attend do not have that problem, and sport reliably produces the want. Once they are there every week, a great deal becomes possible that could not have been scheduled directly, which is why the Nepal clinic teaches machine literacy in the afternoon to a group that came for football in the morning.

Its weakness is that the door is sometimes mistaken for the room. Sport by itself does not keep a girl in school, or make her employable, or protect her. It creates the contact and the trust. What happens with that contact is a design decision, and it is where most of the actual work lives.

This is the reason for the second half of our name. "Sport + Data = Good" is not a slogan about analytics. It means that if sport is how you reach people, then data is how you find out whether reaching them did anything, and honesty about that is a choice you make at the budgeting stage, not at the reporting stage. The Nepal budget carries $235 for pre and post surveys and translation because a report you did not fund is a report you will not write.

It also means being willing to publish when the answer is no. A programme that only ever reports success is not measuring.