Sports and Foreign Policy: “On the Move – Overcoming Borders”
With fairness, tolerance and peaceful competition as its backbone, sport is a popular way to promote international understanding. As a peace policy instrument, the promotion of sport thus helps bolster conflict prevention and management.
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Teenage boys with football
(© picture-alliance/dpa)
At this year’s Sports Ball in February, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle unveiled the Sport and Foreign Policy 2010 initiative. “Sport teaches how to deal with conflict fairly. In conflict regions, sport can foster trust between former adversaries. Sport builds bridges – across linguistic, political and cultural borders.”
With the motto “People on the Move – Overcoming Borders”, the German Foreign Office is shifting the public focus to its international sport promotion. This includes in particular its decades-long efforts to establish and extend recreational sport in developing countries and crisis areas.
Since 1961, international sport promotion has aimed to use the positive impact of sport to break down prejudice, strengthen minorities and thus make a major contribution to international understanding.
With fairness, tolerance and peaceful competition as its backbone, sport is a popular way to promote international understanding. The German Foreign Minister unveiled the Sport and Foreign Policy 2010 initiative earlier this year as a peace policy instrument, helping to bolster conflict prevention and management.
Sport and Foreign Policy
Just 129 days to go – and then it’s kick-off time for “the Beautiful Side of 20Eleven”, when Germany will be hosting the FIFA Women’s World Cup. The diplomatic kick-off for this major event in the sporting calendar took place on February 14, when the ambassadors of the fifteen participating countries were given a warm welcome in Berlin.
Countdown to the 2011 World Cup
A new and innovative project that was currently implemented in norh-western Tanzania connects the aim of development with sport. The German Foreign Office supports this project that was implemented in cooperation with the Tanzanian Ministry of Information, Culture and Sports. The project aims to promote sport in schools, to foster the development of children and young people in one of Tanzania’s poorest regions and, in the long term, to strengthen regional sports structures.
Jambo Bukoba
German sports expert Frank Albin launched the first basketball short-term project in Namibia in cooperation with the German Olympic Sports Confederation and the German Foreign Office. Frank Albin provides the coaches with his expertise and knwo-how and trains them to create sustainblae structures for the future.
Basketball in Namibia
The Gambian Government and the German Foreign Office seek to enhance Gambia's sports structures. Walter Abmayr, on behalf of the German Foreign Office, prepared the project by analysing and evaluating the existing structures. Based on this analysis, the National Sports Programme of Action 2009-2020 was launched.
A project report from Gambia
The training courses for coaches organized by the German Football Association (DFB) have proven to be extremely effective in developing coaching skills. On behalf of the German Foreign Office, the DFB holds courses several times a year for coaches from developing countries, who in turn pass on the skills learned to football enthusiasts in their home countries.
The German Football Association’s coaching courses
