International Women"s Day 2018: The Power of Netball

International Women’s Day is an important date in the Netball calendar, and it is a great honour and privilege to be able to discuss our commitment to empowering women and their communities here on the Commonwealth Games stage.

In recent years, Netball has earned a reputation as a thrilling, captivating, athletic spectacle at the very heart of the Commonwealth Games. These are exciting times: the sport is growing year on year, winning new friends and supporters, adding new national associations and new players. However success and stature bring responsibility, and where we once looked only for recognition, we now shoulder the burden of leadership. Netball has traditionally been a women’s sport, and traditionally a Commonwealth sport. Now we are expanding into completely new territories and cultures and facing up to both the challenges and opportunities that brings.

As a predominantly female sport, Netball has been able to bring sport to communities where women’s roles are tightly circumscribed. I do not need to tell this readership that participation in team sport is far more than simply playing a game. Netball has been a vector to promote women’s health and fitness, an agent to empower women to organise, to educate, to develop new skills and make their voices heard.

In Tonga, for example, Netball is at the heart of a women’s health campaign combatting obesity that is a cultural factor that blights the lives of women and their communities. In India, Netball has provided a focus for thousands of girls from the most impoverished areas to exercise and learn new life skills. In England the ‘Back to Netball’ and ‘Walking Netball’ campaigns are bringing women back to team sport in a friendly, unthreatening and relaxed environment.

We draw strength from our grass roots, and the extraordinary army of volunteers who are the foot soldiers of this international force for good. Netball’s elite athletes also provide the most powerful role models. Uganda’s Peace Proscovia is the International Netball Federation’s first International Ambassador. A woman whose journey in Netball has taken her from a rural African village where her destiny was to stay there and be married at a young age, to captaining the highly successful Uganda National Netball Team, a team making their debut on the Commonwealth Stage next month after rising rapidly up the world rankings. Today Peace is playing for England Netball Superleague team Loughborough Lightning, studying for a Master’s degree at Loughborough University and providing a voice for millions of young girls all over the world. That is what Netball can do.