Healthy lifestyles - The efficacy of sport for health development initiatives for community health

This chapter examines how, within the context of sport for development (SFD), organisations strategically leverage sport to promote positive health outcomes. Sport for Health Development (SFHD) programmes have typically been implemented in the Global South and attempt to reduce poor health indicators, raise health awareness, prevent disease, and improve life skills linked to health and well-being. SFHD uses sport as a mechanism to address issues related to health, often at the individual level. To overcome suggested limitations of current approaches and maximise sport’s efficacy in community health promotion, SFHD initiatives need to adopt a public health model and focus on community engagement to identify locally important health problems and valid solutions to focus programme activities, affirm local social and cultural contexts, empower local residents to design and manage programmes, leverage partnerships with non-sport organisations to build community capacity within a culture of health promotion, and incorporate robust evaluation plans.