Topic: Using Global Sport as an Engine for Development
Country: Finland
Delegate Name: Jennifer Converse
School: Vicksburg High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Finland position papers GLIMUN 2016 committees
Even though Finland's opportunity in hosting recent world championships lays in the Ice Hockey World Junior Championship, Finland has been able to participate in many events around the globe. Finland believes that everyone has the right to a decent life, and improvement in long-term effects on society and other subjects in countries. Even though each country has that right, it's their own responsibility to achieve their own development goals.
Finland is working on an increase of “Grassroot sport,” which promotes volunteering in sports in a relaxed kind of way, and not professionally taken. The idea of contributing to this would help with health, better health means less money on health insurance. These sports could also financially help, since the sports need funding, people come together to raise money and such events are held on public fields which have a slight tax, and some of the money collected could be donated to help with improvement of education, water quality, and other such things.
Finland also believes in a decrease of widespread poverty, and the hosting of a sport could very well help with that. Hosting a sport could mean a rise in jobs for the unemployed, and for big events like the World Cup or the Olympics, it could bring in mighty profits. Great development could come from hosting such big events, but don’t bite off more than you can chew. In Brazil’s Olympic, their developing state has decreased, money used to build the stadium could have been used for water treatment, and in the end, Brazil ended up in debt, not rolling in profits.
So in conclusion, the idea of Finland is to help the people through sports by strengthening factors put into “developing” group, and putting them into the idea of “developed” instead. Even though great benefit could come of this, conflict could come upon the country from sports as well, economically and even socially.
