ASOIF Announces New Governance Support & Monitoring Unit

The ASOIF (Association of Summer Olympic International Federations) Council announced that a new Governance Support and Monitoring Unit (GSMU) is now operational to help federations steer towards better governance by 2020.

Composed of the ASOIF President and three external experts, the GSMU met for the first time this week. It aims to help IFs evolve from the adoption of principles and rules to tangible performances in good governance.

ASOIF President Francesco Ricci Bitti said: “Our unit will be very pragmatic and focus on recommending concrete action, especially to IFs having difficulties introducing governance reforms. We will share with them best practice and offer solutions customised to their size, resources and context.”

Established in 2015, ASOIF’s Governance Task Force (GTF) helps IFs to promote and ensure a culture of good governance within their structures and has conducted governance reviews of each of its members.

The second governance review, published in April this year, demonstrated that progress has been made but there remains much more to do in order to tackle some huge variations in IF governance.

The new unit will help to close some of these gaps and has the declared objective of seeing at least 26 of the 28 full ASOIF members score 120 (out of a maximum of 200) or more in the governance assessment by April 2020, using the 2019-20 questionnaire.

The Council members were also updated on another important, ongoing ASOIF project. “The Future of Global Sport” looks at the speed of change impacting sport from political, social, technological and economic influences.

The objective is to enable IFs to have an adequate understanding of what the future may look like when they take decisions with long-term impacts and ASOIF interviewed key people from the government sector, the business world and sport organisations.

The project also examines the evolving role of IFs and will draw up recommendations how IFs can remain fit for purpose. ASOIF aims to publish the full report in early 2019.

ASOIF Executive Director Andrew Ryan spoke to iSportconnect TV about the initiative at the Lausanne Summit in September.