Sports Tourism : A proposal for economic and infrastructural development in Africa

Abstract

Sports tourism is recognised to be a fast-growing sector in the tourism industry. The current fiscal crisis and poorly performing economies have brought renewed attention to tourism particularly its sports as a tool that could help revive economic growth in Africa. The trend in the performances of sports tourism in Africa i.e. the 1995 Rugby World Cup, 2003 ICC Cricket World Cup, 2010 FIFA World Cup and recently the 2021 AFCON tournament in the last decade, have shown the importance of the sector to the continent’s economy. Hence there is a strong belief that sports tourism has great potential to significantly contribute to Africa’s infrastructure and economic development. The research explores strategies to facilitate sports tourism participation in Africa, with specific references to South Africa’s football club Mamelodi Sundowns and Kenya’s Machakos county as its case studies. While there are other case studies such as Gabon, Cameroon and Morocco, Machakos County and South Africa’s F.C Mamelodi Sundowns appeared as the stand-out cases for the research given challenges each faced such as lack of finances and poor management respectively. The study used a mixed-methods research approach to obtain the key factors, followed by the two mentioned case studies, to propose steps towards sports tourism success against the backdrop of the underlying challenges faced by sports tourism in Africa such as political instability, travel constraints, lack of infrastructure and safety and security issues. The research makes the argument for African countries to adopt a long-term or a more sustainable strategy towards sports tourism rather than the common short-term strategy of seeking to lure megaevents and fast-track development in order to catch up to developed countries. African countries pursuing sports tourism should also be guided by the principle of Africa following its own discourse of infrastructural and economic development, a point that also has bearing on the definition of sports tourism itself as will be demonstrated.