Sports For Development with a difference

JoyMove works in Sports For Development(SFD) with children on the ground adding additional value to pre-existing educational SFD programmes through increasing child participation, engagement, educational effectiveness and overall impact. JoyMove believes it is very important that all children are included in SFD programmes and pays particular care and attention to girls participation and inclusion. One of JoyMove's projects can be read about on our partner organisation CreateJoy website here.

How is Value added?

The value of JoyMove is achieved by ensuring all children's active participation, inclusion and enjoyment in sessions. This increases learning opportunities for children as they get to be more active and participate more.

It is common in SFD programmes for children to spend long periods being inactive such as: waiting in line, watching others, being knocked out. Sessions designed in this way can be considered 'low participation' and can limit how much children learn can be boring for children which can affect how much impact an organisation has with its work with children. Children who are not interested and not engaged, learn less and a programmes effectiveness can suffer.

How is JoyMove different?

JoyMove increases how often children move, how often they participate and how much they enjoy themselves through using inclusive and innovative approaches to SFD sessions and education.

One of JoyMove's main principles for session is 'high participation' explained below.

Low participation and High participation Sessions

Look at the pictures above and below. They are a perfect example of low participation and high participation sessions. In the above picture you can see a chasing game which allows only two children to chase and run away at any one time. There 17 children involved in this game, most of them are participating inactively (88%) most of the time – only 2 children are being active(12%) which can be considered a low participation activity. As previously explained it is common for SFD sessions to be unintentionally designed in a similar low participation way which leads to children waiting for long periods before they can participate which can be boring and disengaging for children.

A high participation lesson activity is an activity where a high percentage of children are participating actively most of the time in a session. See the video above from a game called Bull Dog. 100% of children in this game are actively participating by trying to run past the girl in the yellow t-shirt who is trying to catch them. When 100% of children are participating, this is a high participation activity. When activities have high participation children enjoy more, engage more and learn more. All activities that JoyMove uses are highly participatory which profoundly affects children's engagement and enjoyment and ultimately an organisations effectiveness and impact.