Pro Sport Development, GIZ and ITTF Foundation to Create the Table Tennis for Development Handbook

PHOTO: PRO SPORT DEVELOPMENT (INDIA)

Pro Sport Development (India) will partner with the ITTF Foundation in developing a ‘Table Tennis for Development’ (TT4D) Handbook, as part of the ITTF Foundation’s ongoing collaboration with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (German Development Cooperation/GIZ on behalf of Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung/BMZ). The handbook/toolkit is for coaches and young people demonstrating exercises, sessions and case studies using table tennis for contextualised social development outcomes such as health, education, gender equality and life skills training. The Handbook will also contain a specific module on Ping Pong Diplomacy.

The ITTF Foundation received a number of strong expressions of interest from candidates spread all over the world and is enthusiastic about finding ways to work with these identified experts in the future as it continues to grow. We would like to thank all the applicants for sharing their experience utilising sport for development through high-quality proposals.

Pro Sport Development (PSD) is a social enterprise in India that uses sport as a tool for the holistic development of children and youth. PSD has a profound understanding of sports for development (S4D) modelling and broad experience in holistic approaches to bring positive impacts through sports (not only table tennis), with team members whose solid expertise in mainstreaming gender to implement all sports activities for development.

PSD is also one of the Dream Building Fund (DBF) recipients, with a strong track record in the use of Table Tennis for Development at the community level. PSD focuses on three avenues in employing sports as tools for holistic development, not limited to sporting development. They train the students, the trainers and community coaches and build collaboration with relevant organisations to strategize S4D programmes.

Their focus on closely marrying the sport aspect with the component of social development is a great example of S4D and helped set them apart from other very strong applicants. The ITTF Foundation will work collaboratively with PSD to ensure access to TT4D practitioners on the ground and to help provide content to demonstrate how table tennis can be used to achieve specific UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) targets in the local, community-level context.

The ITTF Foundation is delighted to work with PSD and enthused by more DBF projects applying for this opportunity as it is a good example of how community-level projects can evolve continuously to become self-sustainable and reduce their dependency on grant-making organisations such as the Foundation.

We encourage all practitioners, organisations and projects using Table Tennis for Development at the community level to keep an eye out for the handbook, which will be made publicly available to all, and also encourage them to keep applying for similar opportunities which allow them to share their TT4D expertise at a global scale.

Sign up for our newsletter for updates on our programmes and projects.