This study was conceptualized within the broader sport-based youth development (SBYD) framework. The SBYD field is founded on the notion that sports programs should do more than just increase physical performance; they should also aid in the social-psychological development of children (Camiré, 2012; Holt et al., 2012; Bruner et al., 2021; Malete et al., 2022). Gould and Carson (2008) noted that sports participation can promote a variety of positive youth outcomes, including personal and social responsibility (Wright and Burton, 2008; Bruner et al., 2021), social skills development (Holt et al., 2011), and academic performance (Dwyer et al., 2001).

Many sports programs with a life skill focus have traditionally catered to at-risk adolescents in order to assist them to overcome challenges in their surroundings (Jacobs and Wright, 2018). Some football programs in metropolitan areas, for example, aim to keep adolescents off the streets so they may socialize and participate in sports in a safe environment. While these sorts of programs have been successful in meeting baseline goals such as providing a secure space for adolescents to be physically active, SBYD program goals should be more comprehensive and target all youth, not only at-risk youth. SBYD programs, in particular, aim to improve positive adolescent characteristics (e.g., self-control or leadership) rather than repairing or overcoming teenage weaknesses (e.g., preventing drug use or gang involvement; Lerner et al., 2005). Positive youth development (Larson, 2006), social and emotional learning (Durlak et al., 2011), and the 5C’s paradigm (competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring; Lerner et al., 2005) are all used in the SBYD sector.

In general, SBYD programs provide children from all backgrounds with the chance to learn technical sports skills (e.g., shooting a free throw in basketball) as well as life skills (e.g., leadership, self-control) that they can apply outside of the sports environment.

Life skills, according to Danish et al. (2005), are those skills that enable individuals to succeed in the various situations in which they live, such as school, home, and in their neighborhoods. Life skills are internal human assets that can be enabled or built through sport and transferred for application in non-sport circumstances, according to Gould and Carson (2008). Because life skills, like sport skills, are learned through demonstration, modelling, and practice, while certain positive qualities like self-esteem and global self-confidence can improve through sport participation, these are not life skills because they are personal qualities that cannot be easily taught, learned, and practiced (Danish and Hale, 1981). While sports skills comprise physical and technical motions particular to the sport’s content (for example, dribbling a basketball or serving a tennis ball), life skills can be generalized or adapted to a non-sport setting (Danish et al., 2005). Examples of life skills in this article include leadership, self-control, respect, and self-direction. While sports skills comprise physical and technical motions particular to the sport’s content (for example, dribbling a basketball or serving a tennis ball), life skills can be generalized or adapted to a non-sport setting (Danish et al., 2005). This report focused on the four core dimensions of the youth experience survey for sport (YES-S) to measure Life skills of the youth, i.e., social skills, goal setting, initiative skills, and cognitive skills. The assumption was that a good sport-based entrepreneurship and life skill intervention program can lead to a significant improvement in social skills, goal setting, initiative skills, and cognitive skills among youth in Ghana.

Youth entrepreneurship is a concept in global economics that is thought to be important for economic development and social transformation (Rodov and Truong, 2015). The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI) which ranks countries based on important economic metrics including GDP, ranked Ghana 93 on the 2018 Global Entrepreneurship Index ranking. This report focuses on entrepreneurial skills, beliefs and attitude which encompass but not limited to collaboration and teamwork, initiative and innovation, and critical thinking and problem-solving. Just to list a few.

Within the context of team sports for example, these entrepreneurial skills, beliefs and attitude prevail. They are part of active culture of sports and render a powerful tool to harnessing entrepreneurial skills, beliefs and attitude. Consciously or unconsciously, when youth engage in a sports, specific roles are executed which can harness development of entrepreneurial skills, beliefs and attitude. More achievement has been shown, when the sports learning experience is structure (Malete et al., 2022). Also, incidental learning occurs when youth engage in organized sports participation without a structured intention to develop or promote entrepreneurial skills (McCole et al., 2022).

There is a growing body of empirical research that lends support to the utilization of sport-based interventions tactics in the process of enhancing an individual’s social skills (Brunelle et al., 2007; Anderson-Butcher and Cash, 2010; Hellison, 2011; Riley and Anderson-Butcher, 2012; Draper and Coalter, 2016). Several findings have proposed that regular sports participation during childhood and adolescence contributes to the acquisition of social skills such as collaboration, rights advocacy, recognition of responsibilities, developing empathy, self-control, and leadership; as a result, the level of aggression is reduced, and positive peer relationships are maintained (Anderson-Butcher et al., 2013). Zekioglu et al. (2018) discussed social skills as a person’s verbal or nonverbal behavioral communication abilities that are in accordance with social standards and allow him or her to live in accordance with the social circle. These skills allow a person to communicate effectively with others and have a positive influence on them. Further findings suggest that social skills are necessary for participating in sports that demand working together as a team or that entail sharing the same space with other people. These abilities include internalizing social norms, structuring behaviors in accordance with rules, respecting other people, establishing, and maintaining publicity, speaking with others, collaborating with the group, accepting responsibility, and offering appropriate feedback. In this respect, individuals who have the chance to engage in a community or to develop individual connections through social skills training programs in sporting settings have been able to transfer their talents to other areas of their social life and have adopted a more positive outlook in their interpersonal interactions. This is because these individuals get the opportunity to build and connect with their peers through these programs.

As a result, given Ghana’s high youth unemployment and other development challenges, intentional development of life skills and entrepreneurial mindsets through sport-based positive youth development programs has the potential to yield significant gains (Malete et al., 2022). As a result, the goal of this study was to see if exposure to a sport-PYD and entrepreneurship intervention program would result in improvements in life skills and entrepreneurial skills, beliefs and attitude among Ghanaian youth. We tested the following hypothesis and conceptualized our hypothesized model in Figure 1.

There will be a significant improvement in youth social skills, goal setting, initiative skills, and cognitive skills from pre- to post-intervention.

There was a total of 29 youth in the study. Eighteen (18) of the participants had gone through the sport-based entrepreneurship and life skill intervention program whiles the remaining 11 served as a control group. The participants were grouped into two different camps; Winneba camp and Ghanata camp. At Ghanata, 8 participants were involved in the study. This was made of 5 returning students who had been part of the PYD program since 2018, and 3 new students who were introduced to the intervention. At Winneba 21 participants were involved. This consisted of 10 newly recruited students who taken through the intervention and 11 others who served as control. The control group did not participate in the intervention. However, there was willingness to be part of the study. Out of the total 29, the participants comprised 17 male students and 12 female students. The gender difference was on the basis of the availability of the students. All participants were between the ages 14 and 22. Besides the 5 returning students who had obtained 18 years and above, all the remaining 13 youths were within the ages of 11–18 years. In order to ensure a fair representation of urban and rural youth and a higher representation of youths from low socioeconomic backgrounds, we recruited 3 schools from urban communities; Ashaiman, Labone, and Winneba, and 3 schools from rural communities; Awutu Winton, Fettehman, and Dodowa. School settings, neighborhoods, and parental income were used as a proxy for socioeconomic background. Purposive sampling was used in order to accommodate the varying demographic variables. There was audio and video recording of all the sessions for later transcriptions.

A quasi-experimental pre-post-test control group design was used in this study. The intervention program was created by the principal investigators. The research team members had experience designing and implementing research and outreach programs in youth sports, life skills, pedagogy, entrepreneurship education, and community sustainability. Sport-based life skills and entrepreneurship lessons and activities were delivered concurrently over 6 days, divided into two overnight camps. Each camp lasted 3 days. The control program followed a similar camp structure, ran concurrently with the intervention, and included typical sports activities.

The program covered all costs associated with the camp, including housing, meals, and transportation from home to the venues and back. The survey tools were completed by both the intervention and control groups on their first day at the camps and the last days of the camp. The camps were held from Fridays through to Sundays. A typical day program ran from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. In the evenings, the campers participated in a variety of guided social activities such as field games and watching movies.

The intervention program’s sport and life skills component included social, risk-taking, and creativity games. A typical sporting activity included the use of cones, coshing balls, football, and a basket. The activities were chosen to teach a variety of skills such as teamwork, goal setting, interpersonal communication, problem-solving, and leadership. These skills were chosen because they were relevant to evaluating how students were willing to take risks and the creative strategies, they could adopt to avoid losses.

To teach entrepreneurial mindsets, age-appropriate experiential training workshops on topics such as market research, identifying entrepreneurial opportunities, and financial literacy was used. Participants were instructed to look for parallels between life skills learned in sports and skills identified as important to entrepreneur success, such as goal setting, calculated risk-taking, resilience, and leadership. The daily program was structured to deliver these as separate and combined activities, which were chosen for use in this study, to enhance the learning of individual life skills and entrepreneurship, as well as demonstrate the connection between them. A summary of the program is presented in Appendix 1.

Data for the study was collected with the aid of the Youth Experience Survey for Sport (YES-S) instrument. Since most of our participants were below 18 years, consent forms were given to the prospective participant’s teachers and parents to enable them to decide whether or not they were willing to allow their wards to participate in the program. Only those who express readiness and willingness were taken through the program and given the research questionnaires to complete. Questionnaires were administered to a sample of youth participants who had been involved in structured sports programs, as well as a control group of youth who had not participated in such programs.

We employed the youth experience survey for sport (YES-S; Sullivan et al., 2015) to measure the Life skills and entrepreneurship mindset of the youth. The YES-S is a validated 22-item Likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 4 (yes definitely). The Original scale contains 37 items which were developed by Hansen and Larson (2005) to assess personal and interpersonal developmental experiences and negative experiences in structured activities on five major scales (4 positive and 1 negative). The positive scales comprised Personal and Social Skills, which contains 4 items (e.g., become better at taking feedback), Initiative Experiences (4 items, e.g., I learned to focus my attention), Cognitive Skills (4 items, e.g., I have improved, Skills for finding information), and Goal Setting (4 items, e.g., I learned to find ways to achieve my goals). The sole negative factor on the scale is the Negative Experiences dimension, which contains 6 items (e.g., adult leaders in this activity are controlling and manipulative). We only employed the 4 positive dimensions of the scale to measure the Life skills and entrepreneurship mindset of the youth. The composite scale produced a Cronbach Alpha of 0.85. How the subscales produced reliability coefficients ranging from 0.51 to 0.76. These was deemed reliable considering the sample size. For the qualitative instruments, we used self-designed semi-structured interview guides.