With the 2024 Summer Olympics recently completed in Paris, attention has turned to leveraging sports events to generate billions of dollars in additional revenue for Africa’s tourism sector.
Sports tourism was placed under the spotlight during a panel discussion at the 7th annual Africa Tourism Leadership Forum (ATLF) in Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, from September 3-6. The event saw private and public-sector leaders from around the continent advocating for pan-African approaches to tourism development.
Africa has significant potential to secure a larger slice of the global sports tourism market, which Global Market Insights estimates is worth US$564 billion. While countries such as South Africa and Kenya have made successful inroads into harnessing sports tourism, inadequate infrastructure across the continent and lack of marketing to draw global attention have stunted the sector’s growth prospects.
Gabriel Ajala, CEO and Founder of African Sports Unified, a sports business community focused on growing the pan-African sports market, said harnessing Africa’s world-class athletes as ambassadors, along with year-round marketing and investment in multi-purpose arenas, could catalyse the sector.
“We are not short of current and former athletes to push and promote sporting events. There’s also a need to ensure year-round campaigns so that we don’t just host the event and everything goes quiet. When building stadiums, there needs to be focus on creating multi-purpose arenas so that these facilities can be used for a wide range of events that will economically benefit the country,” said Ajala.
As seen with South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, mega events can create a wealth of long-term gains in infrastructure development, sustainable revenue generation and capacity to host future global tournaments. The World Cup resulted in the construction of the Gautrain high-speed rail system, which still moves hundreds of thousands of passengers per year. The stadiums used for the event have subsequently hosted major sporting events from the African Cup of Nations to international rugby matches as well as music concerts, festivals and conferences.
“If you want to accelerate infrastructure developments, bidding for events is the perfect excuse for government to do so. It gives them more of an incentive to invest in infrastructure,” said Nonnie Kubeka, Head of the Gauteng Conventions & Events Bureau.
How can Africa build its capacity?
Notwithstanding South Africa’s successes, questions remain about the capabilities of the continent to effectively deliver on the expectations of global sports events.
Professor Urmilla Bob of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Agriculture, Earth and Environmental Science, said one of the major findings emerging from research is that well-established, home-grown events have the greatest chance of scale-up.
“When bidding for a large, once-off event, the host country hands over a lot of the power to the organising body. Major global organisers are known for changing their terms of reference and placing huge demands on countries, which forces many countries to opt out.”
Bob pointed to the Comrades Marathon and the Cape Town Cycle Tour as examples of local events that have grown to become international showpieces.
“We’ve seen how these and other events in Africa do establish themselves as major events over time. These are the most viable and feasible pathways for international scale-up and they have high levels of long-term sustainability.”
Tuelo Serufho, CEO of the Botswana National Sport Commission, suggested co-bidding and an incremental build-up of capacity as potential pathways to growing sports tourism.
“Co-bidding with other countries can help us to deliver a good-quality product and split the benefits between smaller nations. In Botswana, we are adopting an incremental approach. We are, for example, bidding to host the World Athletics Relays in 2026 and then we’ll look at the World Championships. As we keep going for bigger events, we build up our expertise and our facilities in a manageable and cost-effective way.”
