HUMANITARIAN SIDE OF SPORTS

                                                

Sport creates significant benefits and opportunities for individuals: good health, work ethic, understanding pressure, learning to overcome loss, improved confidence, and the feeling of pride that comes from representing your club, city, province or country. Sport is understood only as a competitive physical activity for most people, but it is indeed a various form of physical activity that contributes to physical fitness, mental well-being and social interaction. This includes play; recreation, organized, casual or competitive sport; and indigenous sport or games. This less divisive approach of sport provides more room for diversity (different race, color, upbringing, ideologies, beliefs, class) and creativity.

Being a humanitarian means helping people who are suffering and saving lives any time any place in the world. Responsibility, consciousness of the circumstances of other people’s lives and helping them on the basis of need without discrimination are major requirements of humanitarian work. The momentum created for sport for development has made possible to spread the potential of sport in other areas of intervention. Humanitarian action is one of them.

There is a lot of room for sport to take action in a humanitarian action intervention. The emphasis sport lays is on the fact that, it serves as a catalyst for fostering social networks by bringing people of different races, beliefs, different color, different minds together and offering the avenue to increase the ability to share ideas, mingle, learn interact and also cooperate with outsiders. This new forms of positive relationships will enlarge the radius of trust, level of productivity, the circle of people among whom cooperative norms are operative which will lead us to decrease the risk of political dysfunction, negativity, and many more.

Sport cannot be seen as a competitive physical activity alone. Instead, the humanitarian side is a far-reaching inclusive concept, which embraces the physical, mental and social dimension of activities. At the same time, humanitarian side does not only pursue the sole aim to saving lives and alleviating suffering. Other purposes of humanitarian action are to maintain human dignity, protect victims´ fundamental rights and prevent and strengthen preparedness for future disasters. Sport is a powerful low cost and effective means to achieve a combination of several fundamental rights (health, education, development, leisure).

AWOSESO OLUWASEYI DAVID

OS/19B/4035