From Skopje with Insight

How Sport Is Strengthening Youth and Cooperation in the Western Balkans

By GIZ Team Western Balkans

Over the past year, we’ve had the privilege of seeing how sport continues to create real momentum for young people in the Western Balkans, not just as a tool for empowerment, but as a bridge across communities, countries, and systems.

Together with our partners, most notably the Regional Youth Cooperation Office (RYCO), we’ve worked to move Sport for Development (S4D) from pilot initiatives to strategic integration and regional ownership and we’re excited to share a few key milestones with you.

One of the most meaningful moments for us was the “Scoring Development” conference in Skopje (October 2024), which we co-organised with RYCO. It brought together 130 practitioners from across the region: youth workers, educators, civil society actors, public institutions and gave space to exchange, challenge, and co-create. It wasn’t just talk: the outcomes directly informed RYCO’s new 2025–2027 strategy, where sport is now embedded as a tool for regional youth cooperation. For us, that’s a major step towards sustainability.

Building on this, we supported the third regional S4D instructor course in 2025, hosted in North Macedonia and Kosovo. Practitioners from the youth, education, and sport sectors from the WB 6 worked side by side to develop skills in using sport to promote inclusion and cohesion. A personal highlight? The collaboration with NAPOR, Serbia’s youth work umbrella association, which has fully embedded S4D into its national training system and successfully implemented S4D through its member organization in the field. That kind of institutionalisation doesn’t happen overnight but shows ownership and it gives us hope for long-term impact.

We’re also proud to see S4D reaching youth exchange programmes, like SuperSchools, where the approach was applied for the first time during the 2024/2025 school year to support intercultural learning among students. The feedback has been promising, and we’re working on scaling this further.

"This programme didn’t just teach me about sport; it taught me about empathy, respect, and unity." - S4D Youth Ambassador from the Western Balkans 

Perhaps what moved us the most, though, was watching 27 young people step into their roles as S4D Youth Ambassadors. Across 10 local initiatives, they engaged over 250 of their peers in activities that tackled issues of importance for them, from gender equality to social cohesion, all through the medium of sport. The initiatives were designed and implemented independently, with local and team support. Their energy and ownership reminded us why this work matters.

And on the policy level, we saw real traction too: for example, the National Youth Summer School on Social Inclusion in North Macedonia, held in June 2025 as part of the country’s youth strategy. With sport-based sessions on inclusion and equality, it demonstrated how S4D is no longer a niche idea but increasingly a strategic instrument for youth empowerment in the region.

We know the Western Balkans is a complex region. But what we’ve seen over the past years is that sport - when used intentionally - continues to create space for dialogue, trust, and collaboration. We still have a long way to go, but the direction is clear: S4D is no longer just a project, it’s becoming part of the system. And that’s something we’re proud of.

Your GIZ Team from Skopje

Photos: Teaser © GIZ; Article Photo © RYCO/Stojan Rashkov