Assessing the Impact of Covid-19 on Youth Sports Participation in Nebbi Municipality

Abstract

Nebbi Municipality is one of the Municipal in Uganda’s corridors with significant numbers of athletes in the West Nile region which lies North west on Uganda Mapping. The fact that Covid- 19 Pandemic hit worldwide with Uganda inclusive has halted both the indoor and outdoor sports causing total lockdown. The Youths of Nebbi Municipality participated in different Sporting activities with great numbers and motivation. These youths were both males and females of age groups ranging between 15-30. However, with the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, WHO recommended social distancing and human-to-human contact was discouraged to control the transmission. The local professional football leagues, governed by FUFA, ultimately postponed all matches after much deliberation in the transmission risk for the spectators and non-field players. Resultantly, youth athletes were forced to abruptly modify training habits without adequate time for the youths to develop a structured strategy moving forward. The fact that these sports were being used by some youths as a source of income which has caused threat to the local youths. The aim of this study is therefore to Assess the impact of Covid-19 on the youth sports. It is an empirical research and thus adopted purposive sampling and random sampling to gather data from 43 youths who were grouped into clusters with each cluster representing divisions in Nebbi municipal. Results showed that the youths were not much active for both indoor and outdoor activities. The findings showed that the youths were much active in sports activities before and their participation reduced drastically during Covid-19 due to factors like Curfew, Social distance policy among others. There is urgent need to lay strategies by stakeholders to increase youth participation in sports amidst Covid-19.