Academic Talks

Sara Begg

  • PhD Student, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and Head of Monitoring and Evaluation, Cricket Without Boundaries
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  • Twitter: @SaraRBegg
  • Talk Title: Transforming Gender Norms Through Sports Participation - Insights from Adolescent Girls in South-Eastern Nepal

Sara is a PhD researcher from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Her PhD explores a youth-led approach to gender-norm transformation through cricket in Nepal. Built on the back of 18 years of practice as a community cricket coach and coach developer - from inner London primary schools, via rural Northern Uganda, to the cricket-mad “Terai” of Nepal - Sara is committed to realising the Action of Participatory Action Research.

Alongside her academic interests she continues to be involved in cricket development and in particular in coach education working as a National Coach Developer for the ECB and a Master Educator for the ICC, and volunteering her spare time setting up new women and girls’ cricket teams in her home village in West Yorkshire.

Talk Abstract

Restrictive gender norms have a profound impact on girls' experiences and participation in sports within Nepal, fostering disparities in freedom, mobility, and exposure to violence. This research employs a Youth Participatory Action Research approach to understand pathways to transformation of these norms, focusing on adolescent girls' engagement in sports. Involving twenty-three adolescent girls as youth co-researchers, the study engaged in play-based focus group discussions with 153 male and female students, aged 13-19.

We found gender norms enforced by parents and peers significantly restrict girls' sports involvement. Limited free time, reduced mobility, and increased exposure to harassment and violence prevent girls leaving the home and makes their journey to training and experiences at the ground fraught with stress and risk of community criticism. Despite this, we identified a shift in societal perspectives through the pride generated by girls' sporting achievements, indicating a pathway for norm transformation.

In response to these insights, we propose interventions that build girls' confidence in sports, involve boys as allies, and increase the visibility of girls' sports as a strategy to challenge and change gender norms, engaging with interpersonal interactions that uphold and reinforce restrictive norms, and harnessing the power of sports success to cultivate positive change.