Since the NBA opened its first office in Africa in 2010, the league has taken a long-term approach to growing basketball across the continent – starting at the grassroots level by introducing the game and its values to young boys and girls, and then building a comprehensive ecosystem for them to progress and maximize their potential, culminating with the Basketball Africa League (BAL) that is celebrating its milestone fifth season this year.
In only five years, the BAL has become a fixture of the African creative economy, where a thrilling on-court product that features the best players on the continent blends with the music, fashion and cultural diversity that makes Africa so special.
By bringing this world-class sport and entertainment product to more cities and countries, the BAL – and NBA Africa more broadly – continue to transform lives, communities and economies across the continent.
Since 2021, the BAL has contributed more than $250 million to Africa’s GDP, a number that is expected to grow to $5.4 billion by 2034. And nearly 37,000 jobs have been linked to the BAL playing games across the continent over the league’s first four seasons, a number that is expected to grow to more than 650,000 in the next decade.
We witnessed history when the Nairobi City Thunder became the first Kenyan team to qualify for the BAL. And while they came up short of the Playoffs, their performance inspired countless Kenyan fans, many of whom traveled to Kigali to cheer them on in-person or gathered for watch parties back home and will serve as a catalyst for the continued growth of the game in the country.
NBA Opportunities in Kenya
We see enormous potential for basketball, the NBA and the BAL in Kenya and across East Africa, which is why the NBA opened its fifth office on the continent in Nairobi in 2023, led by NBA Kenya Country Lead Michael Finley.
Earlier this year, we launched a multiyear collaboration with Safaricom that is providing basketball development and financial literacy programming to more than 10,000 boys and girls in Nairobi, Mombasa, Eldoret, and Kisumu, marking the NBA’s most expansive youth development program in East Africa to date. And last week as part of our collaboration with Opportunity International, we unveiled a new basketball court in Nairobi that is part of our commitment to build 1,000 courts in Africa over the next decade, including 100 in Kenya.
These efforts reflect what the NBA has seen firsthand through its decades of work in Africa: that sport – and basketball in particular – can be a driver of socioeconomic development in Kenya, throughout East Africa and across the continent.
There is incredible momentum around basketball in Kenya, and we are still just scratching the surface of how popular the game can be in the country. But what we know for sure is that it can have a profound impact on one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies.
This opinion piece was written by NBA Africa CEO Clare Akamanzi.
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