In Fall 2003, a handful of African Studies scholars met during the African Studies Association conference in Boston to discuss the state of African Sports Studies in higher education. At this meeting, they founded and launched the Sports Africa Network.
The Institute for the African Child and the Center for Sports Administration hosted the first Sports, Youth, and Africa conference in February 2004. Participants from fourteen institutions in Africa and the United States attended.
From 2004 to 2014, the conference was held at Ohio University. The first 10 annual meetings addressed various theoretical and practical themes: economics, gender, health, communication, politics, and globalization. Training, financing, infrastructure, etc.Â
After ten annual meetings at Ohio University in Athens (USA), the conference moved to Africa in 2017, where it was first hosted by the Institute for Peace and Social Justice at Bloemfontein Free State University (South Africa). This eleventh Sports Africa Conference theme was “Sporting Subalternities and Social Justice“. In 2018, the twelfth conference was hosted by the University of Zambia under the theme Pan-African Sport Studies: Beyond Physical Education. In 2019, UniversitĂ© Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar (SĂ©nĂ©gal) was the first French and non-English-speaking country to host the conference. The conference, established as the flagship activity of Sports Africa Network, continues to be an exclusive forum for research on the theory and practice of sports in Africa to be produced, exchanged, and disseminated.
Click the button above or use this link to submit the Interest Form—the first step in selecting the 2029 host. Submit by January 31 for priority consideration. The SportsAfrica Board will review responses on capacity and infrastructure, then invite top candidates to complete a full Host Application. Preference goes to institutions with creative, cost-balanced proposals that maximize global attendee engagement, including online participation, while supporting SportsAfrica’s financial sustainability.
17th Annual Conference
The 2027 conference in Cape Town continues the tradition by encouraging interdisciplinary conversations that contribute towards the production and exchange of knowledge. The ultimate goal of such engagements is to promote collaborative thinking and debating to better understand the contemporary challenges within and beyond African sports.
Research, practice, and broader conversations about sports across Africa take place within social, disciplinary, and institutional silos. In this context, sports serves as an umbrella term that includes the entire spectrum of physical activity, ranging from competitive games to individual fitness and daily physical activity. The primary goal of this conference is to bridge these divides by bringing together scholars and practitioners from multiple disciplines and diverse institutions into a more sustained and critical conversation about sports, its management and all the many ways sports impacts daily life on the continent of Africa. >> more
Past conferences
16th Annual Conference – 16ème Conférence SportsAfrica
Theme:Â Sports in Africa: Ethics, Bioethics, Technologies & Culture
Thème: Sport en Afrique : Éthique, Bioéthique, Technologies et Culture
Institut de la Jeunesse et des Sports, Abidjan (INJS), CĂ´te d’Ivoire
Du 3 au 5 avril, 2025
Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
15th Sports Africa Conference and 38th Gwendolen M. Carter Conference
Inclusive and Exclusive Communities: Minorities, Women, and Youth in African SportÂ
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL USA
23-25 March 2023
African Nations and World Competitions – State of Play
Nelson Mandela University -Port Elisabeth, South Africa
June 24-25-26, 2021
Popular Sports, Mass Sports and Elite Sports in Everyday Africa
Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Dakar Sénégal)
June 20-21-22, 2019
Pan-African Sports Studies: Beyond Physical Education
University of Zambia (Lusaka, Zambia)
26Â to 28Â March 2018
Sporting Subalternities and Social Justice
University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa
April 10-13, 2017
Sports in Africa, Ten years – What’s next?
April 10-12, 2014
Sports in Africa and the Global Sports Forum
April 12, 2013
Sports and Community Building in Africa
April 6-7, 2012
Africa and the Global South
March 11, 2011
Politics and Globalization
March 5-6, 2010
Communications, Media and Sport in Africa
February 23-24, 2008
Health, Sciences and Sports in Africa
February 23-24, 2007
Women, Gender and Sports in Africa
February 24-25, 2006
Sports Across Disciplines
February 04-05, 2005
Youth Sports and Africa
February 25-26, 2004
