Africa Forward: Harnessing Sport for Inclusion, Youth Empowerment and Sustainable Development NAFA at UNGA 81 · Nigeria House, New York · 21 September 2026
Your Excellency, Senator Jimoh Ibrahim, thank you for that keynote and for opening Nigeria House to this conversation. To our partners AUDA-NEPAD, NABU and the Cleveland Browns, to United Nations Nigeria, and to everyone who has travelled to be here: welcome.
I lead the Nigeria American Football Association, and as convenor my job is not to give you a second keynote. It is to share what we have learned answering the two questions this event is built on, and to hand them to the panels. This Assembly meets under the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all.” I want to show you what those three ideas look like on a football field in Lagos.
Our event asks how sport equips young people with skills they can use beyond the field of play, and what partnerships are needed to build Sport for Development systems that last. Agenda 2063 answered both on paper years ago: empowered young people under Goal 18, cultural renaissance under Goal 16, integration and global standing under Aspirations 2 and 7. One instrument, one vision.
But on the ground, African sport is not one system. It is three industries running in parallel. Federations are funded to produce medals. Development organisations are funded to produce participation. Private capital is funded to produce revenue. Each behaves rationally. None owns the pathway between them. So a girl in a grassroots programme has no route to a team, a team has no feeder base, and a field sits locked because none of the three can justify maintaining it alone.
I know this because for five years we were all three at once.
When NAFA launched in January 2020, American football in Nigeria had no federation, no donor programme and no market. We had nothing to dismantle, so we could design the junction from day one, on one set of values we call the HUDDLE Way: Health, Unity, Diversity, Development, Livelihood, Entertainment. We put flag football inside secondary schools through the NSSFFL, from one state in 2021 to nineteen in 2025. We built Gridiron Gems and BEMORE so that girls led as well as played, and our women’s programme took Nigeria to first in Africa. More than 450,000 Nigerians have now been exposed to the sport.
And here is what “beyond the field” looks like for us. Michael Sebiomo first touched a flag football in 2019 as a student at Unique Open University. He chose the officials’ route. Today he is Nigeria’s most decorated referee, earns his living officiating in a semi-pro league, trains and equips the next generation of officials, and represents Nigeria at international competitions. Alongside him, GEMS mentees now mentor, and our university chapter presidents lead a HuddleWay Leaders Council. Skills, income and voice, in that order. Panel 1 will take that pathway apart and I hope they are hard on it.
In February this year, Nigeria’s National Sports Commission established a national federation for our sport. It was the right decision, and the sport had earned it. That is what managing transformation means for us. Our response was to become the NAFA Sports Foundation, an Africa-focused organisation built to take what we learned in Nigeria to the rest of the continent: the school league as a model other countries can adopt, girls’ programmes that build leaders as well as players, a collegiate pathway that can run across borders, and a commercial arm so that livelihoods are designed in from the start. None of this would have been possible without Browns Nigeria, whose partnership supercharged our interventions and showed what a club, a foundation and a community can build together. The lesson we carry with us: the nexus must be designed before the institutions separate, or it breaks the day they do.
One honest caveat, and it is about trust. By our own estimate, the large majority of investment in our sport has come from outside Nigeria. I say estimate deliberately, because nobody on this continent is counting, and the numbers that do exist do not speak to each other. Partners cannot trust a pathway they cannot see, and domestic capital will stay away until we can show it one in numbers.
So our method is simple. For every actor in the ecosystem we ask: what does it produce, what does it need, who funds it. Where one actor’s output is another’s input, that is where a foundation should build. Panel 2 is called Playing as One. That is the question I would put to them: what would it take for governments to treat facilities as shared assets, for donors to fund pathways rather than projects, for investors to enter at the development layer, and for the African Union and its partners to give this continent a sports data baseline, which costs less than a stadium and which none of us can build alone?
Agenda 2063 rests its future on young people this continent has not yet reached. Sport reaches them first. If this Assembly is asking how to deliver for all, that is where delivery begins. Thank you, and enjoy the day.