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Paris 2024: A Groundbreaking Summit for Sport, Youth and Sustainable Development
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In a high-level summit on sports and development of a scale scarcely seen before, more than 500 participants from around the world, from Heads of State and Government to public banks and representatives of civil society, committed to using sport as an accelerator of sustainable development. The Paris summit, hosted by French President and the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), seeks to focus minds on new ways to use sport as a vector to improve lives, particularly of young people.
While the streets of Paris were bustling in the run-up to the 2024 Olympic Games, on the evening of Thursday 25 July, the first Sport for Sustainable Development Summit (#Sport4SD) was held at the Carrousel du Louvre in central Paris.
The groundbreaking event was an opportunity for more than 60 heads of state and government, as well as heads of international organizations to express their support for the Paris Agreement for Sport and Sustainable Development.
This agreement sets out ten commitments and aims to achieve the objectives in five priority fields of action: education and employment, health and nutrition, equality and inclusion, financing and impact measurement, and sustainability and legacy.
Further reading: Paris Agreement for Sport and Sustainable Development - The 10 Commitments
Finance: Concrete announcements by the largest sports organizations and Public Development Banks
This “decathlon” of political commitments gave rise to concrete initiatives by sports and financial organizations. The IOC for example, will increase the budget of its Olympic Solidarity Plan by 10%; the LA 2028 Organizing Committee will allocate a €160 million grant for sport and youth; FIFA will invest in the creation of 1,000 sustainable football fields in schools; and the NBA will finance 1,000 basketball courts in Africa.
“It is a great honor to have been tasked with making possible the largest ever summit on Sport for Sustainable Development,” said Rémy Rioux, Chief Executive Officer of Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and a founding member of the Finance in Common (FiCS) movement. “AFD Group, with its subsidiaries Proparco and Expertise France, will continue to engage on this issue with all its partners, particularly within the Finance in Common (FiCS) movement.”
FiCS, whose Sustainable Development through Sport coalition mobilizes Public Development Banks, has resulted in a national and international commitment to the tune of $10 billion for inclusive and sustainable community sports facilities by 2030, the target date for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In this respect, Rémy Rioux announced plans for an innovative partnership between Proparco and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). In collaboration with the Helios Sports and Entertainment Group platform, this partnership will bring about a significant increase in investment in sport in Africa. It aims to act as a catalyst for the ecosystem of sustainable development through sport, promoting both economic opportunities and social inclusion. More broadly, AFD Group will invest €500 million in sport by 2030.
Furthermore, the first Impact Fund for Development through Sport will be submitted for financing at the G7 Ministerial Meeting on Sport for Development on 3 October 2024 in Pescara, and then in early 2025 at the fifth FiCS Summit in South Africa.
Impact measurement through research
To reaffirm the role of sport as an accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals, AFD Group has also announced that it will be working with the World Bank to support the development of sport in Africa. The objective is to produce a new report to enhance the measurement of the contributions that sport makes to sustainable development. There is also a plan to set up a research institute dedicated to the contribution of sport to sustainable development and supported by foundations.
Further reading: Sport and Development – The Key to success
Handing over the flame to Dakar 2026
“Sport, a driver of solidarity and self-betterment, must allow us to move forward to meet so many of our common challenges, and in particular to invest in our next generations of athletes,” said Emmanuel Macron, with a view to the Youth Olympic Games (YOG), to be held for the first time in Dakar in 2026. The President of Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, the future host of the first Olympic event on African soil, took this opportunity of the handover of the flame to call for a “change in the rules of the game”, to make the international system “more inclusive, fairer and more transparent”.
Organizers of this year’s Summit aim for it to become a regular event, to mobilize financing at major sporting events, something Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, said that he would convey at the Summit of the Future in September.
Watch the video of the summit here!