Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

This overview addresses sport’s role and potential in relation to the first Sustainable Development Goal. It outlines the contribution of sport to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. The overview aims at informing, inspiring, encouraging and supporting sport’s contributions to the SDGs by football clubs, foundations, community trusts, football associations and leagues.  

• The right to health serves as the basis for achieving healthy lives through physical activity and sport.

• Physical inactivity has been identified as the fourth leading risk factor for global mortality by the World Health Organization. Regular sport is a countermeasure available to nearly everyone, which can also address the economic impact of physical inactivity.

• Sport and physical activity reduce the risk of contracting non communicable diseases by strengthening cardiovascular health in particular. Participation in sport can contribute to tackling and preventing obesity.

• Sport encourages individuals, including the elderly, to adopt active lifestyles. It has a positive impact on child and healthy adolescent development and well-being.

• Sport can help reduce infant, child and maternal mortality and improve post-natal recovery by increasing personal fitness of mothers and contributing to the prevention of play-related deaths. By implementing child safeguarding measures, sport programmes can ensure the safety and well-being of children and cause change in other sectors by setting a good example.

• Sport-based education programmes are a viable platform for health education, including for hard-to-reach groups, particularly to disseminate information on sexual and reproductive health, alcohol and substance abuse, as well as communicable diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS.

• Sport-based social programmes promote mental well-being for at-risk communities through trauma counselling and inclusion efforts. Sport can enhance mental health by delivering social, psychological and physiological benefits.

• Sport programmes in refugee camps which are run as organised projects on a continual basis can deliver social, psychological and physiological benefits.

• Sport can promote sustainable lifestyles and encourage demand for sustainable consumption of goods and services. Sport can raise awareness about the need for sustainable consumption and production for healthy life and healthy people.

• Sport can promote the importance of clean air for health and can provide sustainable solutions.

Click on one of the icons below to learn more about each goal and how sport can contribute to achieving that goal.