The world of sport is changing fast, and knowledge-sharing is one way to keep pace. I attended the SportsBiz Africa Forum in Kigali as a Communication and Sports Marketing Consultant, where data, AI and the future of sport in a rapidly changing landscape featured prominently.

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For decades, sports business has been built around sponsorship. A company sponsors a club, athlete, marathon or federation in return for branding, visibility, media exposure and association with the sport.
These metrics still matter, but they are no longer enough.
Sports rights are increasingly being viewed as investment assets rather than simply marketing opportunities. A sponsor buys a marketing outcome. An investor buys an economic opportunity – ownership in a team or league, a share of media revenue, a rights package or an athlete's intellectual property.
Private equity firms, family offices and sovereign wealth funds are moving into sport. Firms such as Arctos have built portfolios across major US sports, while Asia-Pacific sports M&A reportedly reached $3.69 billion by July 2026, 12 times the previous year's figure.
Sport is becoming an asset class. Which raises an obvious question: how do you value the asset?
Two competitions can each claim one million viewers and still have very different commercial value. One audience might be young, urban, affluent, use mobile money and travel frequently. The other might be older and have lower spending power.
The real asset is not simply audience size. It is audience quality.
Sponsors and investors increasingly want to know where audiences live, what they earn, what they buy, how they travel and whether exposure changes purchase intent.
That is the difference between media measurement and commercial intelligence. One tells you how many people watched. The other tells you what that audience is worth.
The Australian Football League also uses consumer research on fan behaviour to build more targeted partnership deals.
Africa has extraordinary sports stories. Kenyan distance running, Nigerian football culture, South Africa's sophisticated market, Rwanda's positioning around cycling and major events, and Morocco's tourism-football strategy all demonstrate the continent's potential.
Yet African sports properties remain significantly under-monetised, not because they lack audiences, but because they often lack commercially structured information about those audiences.
A Kenyan athletics event with 20 million views sounds impressive. It becomes a far stronger proposition if the rights holder can show that five million viewers are aged 18–34, two million are frequent travellers, 800,000 are likely sportswear buyers and 40 per cent of the audience is outside Kenya.
That is the difference between selling impressions and selling access to a defined consumer segment.
Its 2021 strategic investment round, led by Tunde Folawiyo and Helios Fairfax Partners, also shows investors backing the ecosystem around the audience rather than simply a sponsorship line.
For athletics, such an index could identify running tourists, marathon participants, sportswear consumers and destination travellers. That could turn a marathon from a broadcast asset into a tourism and investment asset.
This is where sport and tourism converge, a thread that ran through more than one session in Kigali.
It applies to individual athletes, too. A smaller, more affluent and highly engaged following can be commercially valuable because brands can understand exactly who they are reaching.
Deloitte's work on sports partnerships makes a similar point: brands need data on outcomes, not generic reach.
That is a valuation gap as much as a data gap, and it helps explain why African sports properties can be undervalued even when the audience is genuinely there.
The next generation of sports commercialisation in Kenya and across the continent must be built on a simple principle: do not just measure how many people watch. Measure who they are, what they do, what they are worth and what economic value their attention can create.
The most valuable sports rights may not be those with the largest audiences, but those whose owners understand their audiences best.