Promoting Gender Empowerment through Sport? Exploring the Experiences of Zambian Female Footballers

Abstract

Sport-for-development initiatives have expanded in the last decade at a phenomenal rate. As researchers working in Africa over the last six years, it has not only been challenging for us to keep up with changes to work on the ground, but also the ever expanding and increasingly sophisticated debates that now occur regarding this somewhat contentious development area. As Levermore and Beacom (2009) suggest, this body of work has extended from a fairly descriptive outline of the potential of sport to achieve development goals and the possible ways it may do this, to a more critical examination of the capacity of sport to achieve the ambitious goals attributed to it (Coalter, 2007, 2010). Subsequent analyses have also reviewed the position of sport within broader development politics, particularly the role of sport in maintaining or increasing hegemonic global power relations (Darnell, 2007; Darnell and Hayhurst, 2011; Hayhurst, 2009). This body of literature has provided an excellent basis for repositioning and critiquing the sport-for-development movement. However, we argue that there continues to be a gap in knowledge that articulates and examines the experiences of those at the receiving end of sport-for-development initiatives (Hayhurst, 2009). Only a limited number of studies (e.g. Fokwang, 2009; Guest, 2009; Kay, 2009; Lindsey and Gratton, 2012; Okada and Young, 2011; Schulenkorf, 2010; Spaaij, 2011) have directly sought the views of participants and local communities to examine how policy plays out in practice, that is, in the lives of those where sport initiatives are intended to benefit.