Our Consult are Providing Immigration and Visa to the highest standards, with state-of-the-art.
Sport-based life skills interventions offer compelling pathways to understanding the role of physical activity and sport on youth psychosocial and other development outcomes. This is because of evidence that shows the benefits of sport programs to health and well-being of youth, and more lately other areas such as academic achievement and various life skills such as teamwork, leadership and goal setting. However, much of the research in this area of youth development is largely descriptive, with limited capacity to infer causal relationships and application across contexts. Therefore, this study examines the effects of a sport-based intervention program on life skills and entrepreneurial mindsets of youth from three African countries (n = 146, average age = 15.9 years, female = 48.6%). Half of the recruited participants were assigned to a three-week life skills intervention program and the remaining half to a sport-only control program. Both groups completed a demographic information questionnaire, Life Skills for Sport Scale and the General Enterprising Tendency v2 test. Two-way mixed ANOVAs showed significant post-intervention changes in life skills for both groups but changes in entrepreneurial mindsets for the intervention group only. This demonstrates the relevance of sport-based interventions to youth development outcomes in different contexts and the transformative potential of youth sport reported in previous studies. The findings have important implications for intentional and targeted delivery of programs to enhance specific youth development outcomes.
Introduction
Sport is widely recognized as a tool to keep youth constructively engaged and is valued for its health benefits and capacity to teach life skills such as goal-setting, emotional control, leadership, self-discipline and resilience [1,2]. The number and scale of local and global physical activity (PA) or sport-based positive youth development (PYD) programs, such as 4-H, Right to Play and The First Tee, demonstrate decades long interest in sport and youth psychosocial development [3–5]. The rapid growth of PA and sport-based PYD agencies, and millions of youths they attract, affirm the power and intrinsic appeal of sport to children and youth, which makes them excellent avenues for enhancing youth development.
Over the past two decades, a body of knowledge has emerged on life skills transfer from PA and sport to a wide range of youth development outcomes such as academic achievement, self-discipline and interpersonal relations. Although many of the skills shown to be developed through sport and PA are also skills required of entrepreneurs (e.g., goal-setting, resilience, leadership and self-discipline), there is limited research about how structured youth sport programs affect youth entrepreneurial mindsets, an attribute with significant implications for improved livelihoods, especially in areas with high unemployment, or where it is difficult to find a career path in mainstream professions. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where a very large percentage of the population is comprised of children and young adults (a phenomenon labeled as the “youth bulge”), there has been a focus on job creation and entrepreneurship to ensure there are adequate employment opportunities as Africa’s youth come of age [6,7].
Given the potential relationship between life skills development through participation in sport and the development of an entrepreneurial mindset, as well as the dearth of research in this area, this study seeks to broaden the scope of the literature by demonstrating a causal relationship between a sport-based PYD and entrepreneurship intervention program and the development of life skills and entrepreneurial mindsets in youth across three regions of Africa. Developing life skills and entrepreneurial thinking among youth could have more direct applications to economic opportunities, improved livelihoods and building resilient communities [8–11]. It also hopes to address some of the identified gaps in the PYD and sport-for-development research [12]. These gaps include evidence of causal relationships, application of findings across contexts, and investigations involving youth from understudied populations. The study also offers a different approach to nurturing entrepreneurial mindset in youth to what has widely been reported in the sport management and entrepreneurship research
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Laudantium eius, sunt porro corporis maiores ea, voluptatibus omnis maxime
Sed maximus imperdiet ipsum, id scelerisque nisi tincidunt vitae. In lobortis neque nec dolor vehicula, eget vulputate ligula lobortis.
Vivamus gravida felis et nibh tristique viverra. Sed vel tortor id ex accumsan lacinia. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus.