The diffusion of development-through-sport: analysing the history and practice of the Olympic Movement's grassroots outreach to Africa

The idea of sport as a tool for development has a long and ambitious history, up to and including a recent proliferation of international sport programmemes targeting grassroots development. The popularity of these programmes, however, raises interesting questions about the influence of sport across diverse contexts: how do ambitious claims about the universal value of sport diffuse into actual practices in distinct cultural communities? This essay uses the case of the Olympic Movement's grassroots outreach to Africa to document a historical pattern of grand and problematic ambitions for the role of sport in development consistently diffusing into modest, diverse and generally neutral practices. To analyse this pattern, the essay begins by drawing on concepts from existing scholarship related to the cultural diffusion of sport, and then considers examples in two parts: first, analysing the historical record of Olympic Movement outreach to Africa and second, analysing ethnographic examples from fieldwork in Angola with a contemporary development-through-sport programmes descended from the Olympic Movement. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of how analysing empirical examples from the history and practice of grassroots sport outreach might inform understandings of the development-through-sport endeavour.