In the week building up to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the IWG attended UNESCO’s ‘Change The Game’ Forum at their headquarters in Paris.
The two-day event brought together over 500 policy makers and senior sports leaders from around the world and provided insightful discussions around the transformative power of sport for sustainable development.
The Partners’ Forum, held on day one of the event, advocated for and illustrated the social impacts of investments in sport policies and programmes. It also featured the launch of UNESCO’s ‘Social Impact of Sport Report’, which helped to set the scene for a series of sessions exploring topics related to investment in sport through people, infrastructure and innovation.
The following day, at the Ministerial Forum, UNESCO hosted a major gathering of high-level sport policymakers. This event brought together government representatives from the fields of sport, education and equality, alongside sport professionals, educators and civil society actors with the aim to identify commitments to strengthen the social impact of sport. This coincided with the publication of their ‘Sport and Gender Equality Game Plan’ which provides guidelines for gender-transformative sport policies and programmes.
Lisa O’Keefe MBE, Secretary General of IWG Women and Sport, said: “Having a multi-stakeholder global sports conference on this scale is so important in the push towards gender equality and equity within sport, and a huge thanks to UNESCO for driving this work forwards.
“The IWG enjoys a strong strategic partnership with UNESCO, so I’m pleased our Chair Annamarie Phelps CBE OLY and our Head of Strategic Communications Abby Burton were able to support them by being in attendance at this ‘Change The Game’ Forum.
“It was fantastic to hear the Forum was a success, with global leaders in attendance alongside influential stakeholders, and some important discussion topics across the two days.
“It was also great to see the publication of their ‘Sport and Gender Equality Game Plan’ which serves to highlight the on-going gender gap within sport and provides some excellent tools and examples of best practice to address these inequalities. It’s a very useful and comprehensive resource, which I know will be of interest to the IWG network.”
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