Sport For Development Programmes
PSD International’s approach utilises sport as a participatory tool to provide young people with the requisite skills and capacities to effectively deal with the demands and challenges of everyday life, thereby increasing their chances of enrolling in higher education and/or gaining meaningful employment in the future. Our approach is compelling as it utilises the contemporary tool of sport to tackle prevalent social issues faced by young people, in particular relating to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:
Community Sports Programme
Since October 2018, PSD International has been administering the Community Sports Programme (CSP) in the city of Bhubaneswar, Odisha in Eastern India. The CSP serves children between the ages of 5-16 years from low-income and marginalised backgrounds residing in slum settlements across the city of Bhubaneswar. Using a specially designed multi-sport curriculum, the CSP supports the children’s holistic development by teaching soft skills and sporting values which builds their confidence and self-esteem and enables their socio-emotional development. There is a special emphasis on the participation of girls, and on teaching the children to work in mixed-gender teams.
The CSP is designed to:
- Enable children, especially girls, develop soft skills and learn important values while growing in confidence and building resilience.
- Develop positive relationships between girls and boys based on mutual respect, equality, and friendship.
- Facilitate understanding of the benefits of sports participation of children amongst key stakeholders in the community.
Since August 2022, PSD has partnered with the Global Fund for Children to provide the CSP to children between the ages of 5-10 years.
Community Table Tennis
The Community Table Tennis project was supported by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) Foundation’s Dream Building Fund. The project worked towards empowering girls and boys between the ages of 10-16 years from underserved slum communities in the city of Bhubaneswar in Eastern India to become gender-sensitive, confront harmful gender-based stereotypes and impact gender-perceptions of peers, family members and school teachers. Utilizing a structured and goal-oriented curriculum centered on Table Tennis, the project effectively achieved its objectives.
Commencing in April 2021, the project reached its successful conclusion in August 2023.
