​African Sports Business Association
OUR ADVISORY TEAM
Ruth is a Principal Lecturer and Director of International Development for the Faculty of Health & Life Sciences at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England. Her main responsibilities include developing international links and agreements with other Institutes of Higher Education and international sport organisations, as well as teaching within the field of sport management.
She has an international reputation as a sport management educator and has delivered many sessions overseas at partner institutes in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. Ruth has also been responsible for developing international programmes for overseas institutes and has sat on many validation panels both in the UK and abroad. She has been teaching in Higher Education for over 18 years and currently teaches at postgraduate level on various modules including organisational development, change management, resource management, and strategy implementation.
Ruth is an active Executive Board Member of the European Association for Sport Management and was recently nominated onto the Executive Board of the newly formed World Association for Sport Management.
Ruth's main research interest is in sport tourism and in particular countryside management. Her research interests have enabled her to travel to many different countries where she has spent time examining different perspectives on how to manage national parks and tourists. Her current research involves an international occupational audit of what sport managers do, and she is working jointly on this with colleagues from Australia, North America and New Zealand.
Dr. Ruth M. Crabtree
Professor Henry Thairu
Professor Thairu is a renowned Kenyan academician and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurship and innovation. He is the Head of the Commission for University Education. CUE is the University Education Regulatory and Accreditation body in Kenya and it falls under the Ministry of Education.
Previously, he was the Vice Chancellor at Inoorero University and is a former Deputy Vice Chancellor at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT).
He is an Advisory board member at the Sustainable and Holistic African Development Alliance (SHADA). Prof. Thairu is the founding and former Managing Director of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) Enterprises LTD, a company for training and commercialization of University developed Innovations.
He has served as the African Representative in the Executive Committee of World Association of Industrial, Technical and Research Organization (WAITRO) (2000-2004) and, since 2001, is a member of the Executive Committee of the Global Consortium on Higher Education Research in Agriculture (GCHERA).
Prof. Thairu has served as Chairman, Joint Working Committee of the African Institute for Capacity Development (AICAD) at JKUAT. He is a member of the American Chemical Society, the Board of World Computer Exchange (WCE) and the Council of UbuntuNet Alliance, the Regional NRENS Connectivity provider.
Dr. Vassilis Dalakas
Vassilis Dalakas, a native of Greece, earned his PhD in marketing from the University of Oregon, home of the James H. Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. He also has an MA in West European Studies from Indiana University and a BA in Business from Hanover College.
He is currently an associate professor of marketing at California State University San Marcos and also teaches as a visiting adjunct professor at the Sports MBA program at San Diego State University and at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Previously he taught at the Sports Business Program at Northern Kentucky University and has also taught sports marketing internationally at the University of New Orleans International Summer Program in Innsbruck, Austria.
He has won several teaching awards including the Outstanding Marketing Teacher Award from the Academy of Marketing Science, the Outstanding Educator Award for Innovative and Creative Teaching from the Academy of Educational Leadership, and the AxcessCapon Teaching Innovation Competition from the Marketing Management Association.
He presents his work regularly at conferences and has presented at major marketing conferences like the American Marketing Association, the Academy of Marketing Science, the Association for Consumer Research, the Society for Consumer Psychology, as well as the Sport Marketing Association. Some of his research on fan response to sponsorship has been featured on ESPN.com and the IEG Sponsorship Report. In addition, he has been quoted regarding marketing or sports marketing insight in several media outlets including MSNBC, CBS Business Net, and Yahoo Sports.
Vassilis has served as an officer for the American Marketing Association Special Interest Group on Sports Marketing and he currently serves on the editorial review board of two of the major journals in the field of sports marketing, Sport Marketing Quarterly, since 2006, and Journal of Sport Management, since 2012
David Ducci
David is the founder and CEO of SUD Sports Agency, a sports and entertainment consulting firm based in Monaco, French Riviera. SUD Sports Agency offers a wide range of services that include; Security and Safety, Sport Events Management, Sports Marketing, Sport Strategies, Scouting and Luxury VIP concierge services for professional athletes and their families, sport organizations and sport businesses.
David is a former professional footballer from the Academy of AS Monaco. After his playing career stopped early due to injury, David led several professional Football clubs in France and abroad before launching his company, SUD Sports Agency.
He has over 15 years experience in the management of professional sports clubs and organizations and has organized many international events and participated in many organizations as a consultant for the clubs, federations and sport businesses.
David holds a sports law degree from the famous Sorbonne University in Paris, a Masters Degree in Sports Management from the University of Nice, on the French Riviera and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Lycée Albert Ier Monaco.
David served as President of the Association "DSP-Sports Law Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne" (2006-2008) and was a member of the commission Legal appeal LFP (Professional Football League - Paris)(2010-2013).
In addition, David serves as a Speaker on sports management in Toulouse, Rouen and Speaker on sports law at the Sorbonne famous law University in Paris. He also teaches sports law and FIFA rules EAJF (FIFA Agent's French school in Paris and Lille)
David is Passionate about sport, and takes a lot of pleasure to transmit this passion for sport and its values.
Professor Kamilla Swart
Kamilla Swart is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Business, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT, from 2003). Her research interests include sport and event tourism, with a specific focus on mega-events and event policies, strategies and evaluations. She supervises Masters and Doctoral students and lectures fourth year research methodology and research projects. Kamilla is committed to developing the new generation of sport and tourism researchers, especially from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. Kamilla received a C3 rating from the National Research Foundation in 2012. She was instrumental in developing the 2010 Research Agenda and was appointed by the City of Cape Town as Research Coordinator for 2010 on behalf of the Cape Higher Education Consortium
She has consulted to a broad range of public and private sector organisations. Recent projects include, providing strategic input into the MasterCard Affluent Awards Programme and Rustenberg’s 2013 AFCON bid, and developing a sport tourism strategy for a triathlon event. Kamilla currently serves as the lead consultant on the Octagon evaluation team who were appointed by the National Department of Arts and Culture to develop a monitoring and evaluation framework for the Mzanzi Golden Economy programme. She is also part of a team developing a domestic tourism strategy for Lesotho.
Kamilla is the project lead for CPUT on National Department of Tourism projects, including the development of a framework to assess events (2013-2015). She also serves as the principal investigator of the CPUT team for CARNIVAL, a 852 000 Euro funded, four year project by the EU Commission. It will critically analyse the management and legacy of mega-events with partner institutions in Brazil, England, Germany, South Africa, and the USA. She has been invited as a guest speaker and/or panellist at various international sport and tourism conferences, and has presented in more than 10 countries.
Kamilla worked as a sponsorship consultant for Octagon SA from 2000-2003. Two key tourism-related projects included developing and managing the event tourism strategy for the City of Durban and developing the national event strategy for the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism and South African Tourism. Prior to this, she worked at the Cape Town 2004 Olympic Bid (1995-1997) as a Sport Manager responsible for liaising with all the international sport federations regarding their technical requirements as well the national sport federations regarding their training venue requirements.
She completed her doctoral degree in education and sport tourism and graduated from Illinois State University in 2001. Kamilla has published 37 peer reviewed articles, 16 book chapters and 4 conference proceedings as well as numerous conference presentations and technical reports. Kamilla co-authored the first U.S. text on sport tourism in 2002. Her manuscripts have been published in the Journal of Sport Tourism, Third World Quarterly, Politikon, Urban Forum and Development Southern Africa (DSA), amongst others. She has co-edited three special issues on mega-events and the 2010 FIFA Cup in Alternation (2010), DSA (2011) and the African Journal of Physical Health Education and Recreation (2012). Kamilla serves as Regional Editor (Africa) for the Journal of Destination Marketing and Management and serves on the editorial board of SportsWorld, the journal of Global Sport and a new Taylor & Francis publication, Events, Society and Culture.
Gerard A. Akindes
Gerard Akindes is currently working for the Josoor Institute in Doha, Qatar. His role with the Josoor Insitute consists in organizing sports and events management programs.
Prior to moving to Qatar, Gerard taught sport management and sports and development in the Department of Sports Administration at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. His academic publications focus on international sport management, the political economy of sport, and elite athletes’ mobility and migration. . He co-edited a book on identities, politics and football in Africa.
He is co-founder and coordinator of the conferences on the Sports in Africa and the Interdisciplinary Electronic Journal of African Sports Ohio University, Impumelelo.
Gerard Akindes has an extensive sport background of active engagement in both playing and coaching. He played international basketball in Benin, Togo and Cote’Ivoire and coached youth, women and men basketball in Belgium.
