Paper short abstract:

This paper examines modernity discourses in a US-sponsored development project in Tanzania, managed by Tanzanians and using sport as a tool to ‘develop’ and ‘modernise’ young, uneducated Tanzanian girls. It raises questions of ownership of development projects, the modernities they endorse and for whom

Paper long abstract:

Sports have recently been incorporated into international development agendas in a bid to empower women and foster gender equality. Considered a masculine domain, sports are argued to empower women by challenging the status quo and their 'traditional' positions in societies.

This paper examines the use of sport in a US-sponsored development project located in Arusha, Northern Tanzania's largest urban settlement. The project consists of a Tanzanian-run athletic camp for aspiring female runners which, like other training camps common throughout East Africa, provides financial support for them to live and train full time.

The camp's sponsor aims to empower these young girls to use their sporting talent to further their education, by applying for Athletic Scholarships to American universities. This directly contradicts the coach's goals, however, who deliberately recruits only uneducated girls - ineligible for scholarships - from isolated rural areas. Rather than pushing girls towards education, the coach enacts his own version of development by providing a stable urban environment for them to construct their identities as 'modern' urban women, while earning money from running.

Meanings of 'tradition', 'modernity' and the existence of multiple modernities hold central roles anthropological debates, the relevance of which increases with urbanisation, associated urban lifestyles and modes of consumption. Those involved in the camp all imagine development in terms of movement towards notions of modernity. This paper argues that these imagined modernities do not always coincide, however, thus affecting perceptions of ownership of the camp, of the form of development it endorses and for whom.