What you need to know:
- Rita Aliguma, founder of the Aliguma Foundation, attended with four members of her team. The foundation is an NGO that uses sport and enterprise to address challenges in rural communities and slums.
Sport leaders from federations and community organisations were urged to look beyond medals and podium finishes and make sport accessible to every Ugandan, whatever their age, ability or economic status.
The call came during the TAFISA Certified Leadership Course (CLC) Level I, a four-day training at Nob View Hotel in Ntinda, which run from Monday to Thursday and was hosted by the Uganda Olympic Committee (UOC) through its Social Development through Sport Commission. The course was run in partnership with The Association For International Sport for All (TAFISA) under the SÜCCEED Programme and the Olympism365 agenda.
It brought together federation presidents, general secretaries, commissioners and leaders of NGOs that use sport as a tool for social change. The aim was to give them the skills to plan and run inclusive community sport and physical activity programmes.
Katongo Bwalya, a physical education and sport lecturer at the University of Zambia and a TAFISA expert, facilitated the course with Zama Didritch Tsabedze from Eswatini. She said the emphasis on elite sport in many African countries had left large sections of society behind.
"There is a lot of emphasis on elite sports or competitive sports looking for medals, podium performance. But on the other hand, we talk about how everybody can benefit from the good that sport has to offer," Bwalya said.
TAFISA wants federations and sports NGOs to reach older people, people with disabilities, refugees and people who are economically or socially marginalised.
Intentionality and adaptable training
"This doesn't happen by chance. We have to be very intentional," Bwalya said before adding that many participants were already running inclusive activities without naming them as such. The course is widening their understanding of who gets left out.
"Inclusivity is not just about gender. Inclusivity is also about infrastructure, social and economic status. You can exclude based on tribal settings, for example," she said.
She added that the training is adapted to each country because challenges differ across the continent.
"A challenge in Sierra Leone may be very different from what the Ugandan challenges would be," she said.
The modules cover Sport for All as a tool for transformation, global policy and strategy, leadership, and building and sustaining initiatives. Safeguarding, good governance and gender equality also run through the course. In his session on global trends, Tsabedze focused on building networks with the health and education sectors, policymakers, the media, and federations. He also looked at how to turn global sport policies into action at community level.
The law and the grassroots
Patricia Ayebare, a commissioner at the Federation of Uganda Basketball Associations (Fuba) and an IOC-certified safeguarding officer, believes the course comes at the right time.
The National Sports Act, 2023 requires a national sports federation to show that Ugandans take part in its sport in at least 75 percent of the country's districts. A national sports association must show participation in at least 50 percent of districts. Ayebare said federations will struggle to reach those levels without community sport and facilities.
"How can we use our sports in the different communities if we don't have playgrounds, if we don't have basketball courts and all these things?" she asked.
She described the course as "a very big enlightenment in terms of inclusion, in terms of equality, in terms of equity."
"The main big goal is ensuring that we are physically active as Ugandans, and also trying to promote physical activities or health activities around our children, around our youth, around generally everyone in our community," Ayebare added.
Participants have been divided into groups. Each group will design a community project and present it today, when the course ends with certificates. TAFISA will provide seed funding to get the projects started. Level I is a requirement for Level II, and more coursework is planned up to 2027.
"For you to be part of Level 2, you should have done Level 1, so you can't join in at Level 2," Bwalya said.
Rita Aliguma, founder of the Aliguma Foundation, attended with four members of her team. The foundation is an NGO that uses sport and enterprise to address challenges in rural communities and slums.
"The fact that we are reaching out to different people in different communities, definitely, you need an empowered leader, and that's more reason I had to bring other leaders with me," she said.
Her team includes an administrator and the principal of Sunny Magezi Academy. The foundation launched the community school in Kinuuma Village, Masindi in November 2025, with sponsorship from the UEFA Foundation for Children. Aliguma said both plan to pass on what they have learnt to the teachers and administrators back at the school.