Healthy citizens are a nation’s greatest asset. Exercise is very important for the health of people of all ages. The American College of Sports Medicine once strongly advocated the idea that “exercise is medicine”. To build a sports environment and create an atmosphere conductive to sports in Taiwan, the Sports Administration has the three core missions of sports industrialization, sports internationalization, and sports nationalization. Through activity promotion, competency dissemination, talent nurturing, organizational environment and other strategies programs including iSports Taiwan have been implemented. A survey showed that, in 2020, the percentage of people in Taiwan doing sport and exercise was 82.8%, while the percentage doing regular sport and exercise was 33%, making national health Level Up.

 

The current situation and effectiveness of the promotion of sports for all in Taiwan

Since 1997, Taiwan has successively implemented programs including Sunlight Fitness, Sports Population Doubling and Molding Taiwan into a Sports Island Program and implemented the six-year “iSports Taiwan Program” from 2016- 2021. The aim was to achieve the objectives of everyone doing regular sport, combining sport and life and loving sport through the promotion of various policies.

 

The Sports Administration provided guidance to city and county governments for the implementation of the iSports Taiwan Program under which diverse sports including water sports, cycling, and sport for the elderly women, employees, the mentally and physically disabled, foreign migrant workers and new immigrants were promoted, providing exclusive services to each group. In 2020, 2,200 activities were held together with county/city government. The results are:

 

1. Steady growth in the population doing regular sport and exercise; the percentage of the population doing regular sport and exercise remained steady at around 33% from 2014-2020.

2. The habit of exercise in now deeply implanted in people’s lived; 71.6% of people have not been affected by the epidemic.

3. Compared to overseas, COVID-19 has been effectively controlled in Taiwan and the epidemic has had limited impact of people’s lives. 81.6% think life is happy, up by 3.3% on 2019 (78.3%).

4. With cooperation between central and local government, more than 2.2 million sports and exercise participation opportunities have been provided.

 

The Sports Administration held the two-day 2021 iSports Taiwan Program End of Term Joint Meeting on the November 4th and 5th to establish an exchange platform for learning, review and feedback and jointly review the results of the implementation of the iSports Taiwan Program in 2021. On the first day, counties and cities that have achieved good results in handling local distinctive sports shared their operating and development strategies and counties and cities awarded High Distinction for more than four years shared their results and administrative performance; the Sports Administration explained the results of and reviewed the iSports Taiwan Program over the last six years to achieve the objective of mutual promotion by central and local governments. On day two, the Sports Administration invited 15 members of the central visit committee to evaluate the 2021 execution results presentations (including project planning, visit guidance, competency training, administrative effectiveness, overall marketing and resources integration) of each county and city government to provide a basis for review and improvement of implementation of the Sports for All program by central and local government next year, aiming to increase administrative effectiveness and provide the best services to facilitate sports for all.