Michael Pedersen facilitated governance workshop training for presidents and secretary generals of the 10 national Olympic committees under the umbrella of Confederation of Southern African National Olympic Committees (COSANOC). COSANOC brings together the national Olympic Committees in Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The 2-day governance workshop training took place in Johannesburg, South Africa on 16-17 November 2018. Based on a highly innovative, interactive and engaging design, the workshop training was focused on the following themes:

• The strategic importance of good governance and a conceptual framework for agreeing to what the scope of governance issues is
• Governance risk management, including mapping and assessing governance issues
• Board professionalization and integrity
• Conflicts of interest
• Board performance evaluation and enhancement of efficiency of individual board members
• Democratic structures and processes
• Transparency and accountability
• Stakeholder engagement
• Levelled playing field for athletes
• Sport event integrity
• Integrity in ‘sport for development’ projects
• Ethics and integrity based organizational leadership and culture, including concepts for contemporary sport leadership and for being an inspirational leader
• Fairness and trust
• Ethical behaviour of staff and volunteers

The participants rated the governance workshop training 4.2 on average on a scale from 1-5 (the score 4 indicated “good” and the score 5 indicated “very good”). Furthermore, the participants rated their individual increase in change-willingness at the end of the workshop training 4.3 on average on a scale from 1-5 (the score 4 indicated “quite a lot” and the score 5 indicated “to a great extent”).