Perceived Impact of Sport Tourism on Socio-Economic Development of Host Community: A Case Study of Nigeria Youth Games Hosted by University of Ilorin in 2019

Abstract

Sport tourism is one of the largest and fastest growing segments of the travel and tourism industry that contributes significantly to the economic, social development and tourist traffic in a city or town where such events take place. However, Nigeria Youth Games competition which was instituted by the Federal Ministry of Youth in 2015 was a great avenue to discover and nurture athletes from grassroots to stardom. The descriptive survey design was used and the target population for the study comprised male and female sports marketers. Respondents were stratified into males and females, while simple random sampling technique was used to select 150 respondents from the population of 300. Close-ended questionnaire drawn in a four-point Likert format of strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree and was validated and tested for reliability with reliability coefficient of 0.78 was used to gather data from respondents. Descriptive statistics of frequency, percentage and mean scores were used to answer the research questions, while the hypotheses generated were tested using independent t-test at 0.05 level of significance. The result shows that there was no significant difference in sports marketers’ perception of the impact of sport tourism on both social and economic development of the host community. Among the recommendations suggested are that Federal Ministry of Youth and Sports Development should ensure that the hosting of the games be taken round to all states of the federation to enhance their socio-economic development among others.