Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) Organisations and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of Nepal

Abstract

With growing empirical evidences of sport’s positive impacts on socioeconomic development and peacebuilding, there is progress in theorising sports as a vehicle for social change and global growth of sport for development and peace (SDP) organisations; undoubtedly, the SDP sector can play a significant role in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs), particularly in the least developed countries (LDCs). However, local SDP organisations and related government policies in LDCs have rarely been studied, and there have been no studies conducted yet focusing Nepal. Thus, this paper explores the grassroots SDP organisations in Nepal and have found that ‘Youth and Sport’-related non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are proliferating since 1990, increasing from 157 to 3799 in 2000, and recently reaching 11,886 in July 2017, thus contributing to the SDGs in many ways. However, the government has had no independent and organised SDP policy so far, and the related policies reviewed in the several policy documents are also not well linked with the national SDG framework and remain far apart from the global SDP movement. To develop a well-functioning SDP sector in countries like Nepal, we suggest further exploration of the ‘Youth and Sport’ NGOs and developing a comprehensive, independent national SDP policy that accelerates the achievement of SDGs in Nepal.