The Olympic dream: Africa’s dilemma

Last week the Paris Olympics kicked off with the message, ‘’Games Wide Open’, which reflects their willingness to allow every athlete from around the world to enjoy the full Olympic experience and at the same time drive significant social impact. It is a promise of inclusivity and mass participation with genuine appreciation for international sport.?

However, the competition is not protected from the wider issues at hand with regards to geopolitics and societal failures. European visas over the years have become increasingly difficult for most Africans and Asians to obtain. Contestants that hail from these descent have had their nationalities questioned and even still to the extent that France banned its athletes and officials from wearing hijabs.?

To put the numbers into perspective, the EU made an estimated €56 million in fees for rejected visa applications from African countries in 2023. Just last month the fees increased by 12.5%. In 2023 alone, African nationals received over 700,000 negative responses for Schengen Visa applications. A rejection rate that is 10% higher than the global average.? These high rejection rates pose a significant barrier for Africans seeking to travel abroad, especially to the Schengen region in Europe. Data indicates that 70% of the top 10 countries with the highest visa rejection rates are in Africa.

In recent decades, there has been a significant increase of athletes of African descent in European and American sports. Globalisation, professionalism, higher competition standards and higher salaries have led African athletes to move to foreign countries and clubs. The question is why? The familiar tales of inadequate preparation and administrative snags involving African Olympic athletes began to trickle out of every Olympic news cycle.?

Back home, fans and some athletes blame the disappointing results on lack of preparation and? administrative errors by national athletic associations. Calls for the responsible officials' resignations and a complete overhaul of sports administration structures feature highly across social media, domestic mainstream media, and among individuals in various African countries. Common issues within sports organizations are continuously highlighted, including corruption, nepotism, insufficient funding, and interference from political elites. Therefore pushing athletes to search for better chances to succeed and compete on the international level by changing their citizenship and moving countries.?

African countries are still not spending the recommended 4 to 6 percent of national GDP and/or 15 to 20 percent of total public expenditure on education, even though funding in absolute terms has generally increased in the past decade. And the odds of that changing seem unlikely, with a joint World Bank-UNESCO report finding that many low to lower-middle income countries have reduced their education budgets since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.?

Debates usually focused on whether to maintain and enhance the centralized, state-controlled system or if African sports programs would benefit more from a flexible, private sector-driven model similar to that of the United States. Beyond the false dilemma implicit in that argument, it ignores the correlation between decreased spending on education since the International Monetary Fund-imposed Structural Adjustment Program era of the 1980's and 1990's; difficulties in developing and managing athletic talent; and disappointing international sports outcomes.

For many decades dating back to the pre-independence period, many African countries still produce sports talent through the basic education pipeline. Local, national, regional and continental school competitions serve as a proving ground for athletes, many of whom eventually go on to represent their countries at international athletic competitions.

In football, a 2021 KPMG report showed over 500 professional African players in first teams across 11 top-tier European club leagues – totaling to 6% of the player base. This calculation was based on primary nationality only and excluded players of African origin who play for non-African national teams. Second- or third-generation Africans with European or dual citizenship comprise an even higher percentage.?

Of the 24 nations that qualified for the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, only three (South Africa, Egypt and Namibia) had no dual nationals on their squad. Thirty-one players had to miss the English Premier League games to represent their countries.

For a continent with over 1.3 billion people and an average age of 20, revitalizing the education-athletics pipeline and finding ways to attract investments to the sports sector, despite tightening public revenues, should be straightforward. The political, economic, social, and cultural advantages of sports are significant, many of which were evident during the Olympics. The successful rollout of the Basketball Africa League illustrates the kind of public-private collaboration that augurs well for a revolutionary sports ecosystem in Africa. The primary challenge for African countries is balancing infrastructure development and investment returns with the broader needs of their population's talent and the sustainability of sports facilities.

Sport is often celebrated as a great equaliser because power, wealth, politics, race or nationality can intersect in the same arena. However, it requires costly facilities, equipment, coaching and leisure time – and can also be used to systemically exclude or discriminate. For the Olympics to be genuinely inclusive, organizers, host countries, and participating nations must follow through on their commitments. The ultimate goal being a celebration of values which bases its efforts to promote sport, culture, and education, aiming to create a better world.