The inaugural Africa Golf Summit gets underway on 9 September at the Serengeti Golf Club near Johannesburg, South Africa.

The summit – which was launched earlier this year and is owned and managed by Pure Grit Project and Exhibitions Management – aims to provide a platform for breakthrough opportunities for key players in the golfing, tourism, economic development and sporting sectors.

The summit’s conference will bring together specialists from a diverse range of business and government professions, who will discuss ways to evolve and grow the golfing industry and how it can impact inbound and domestic tourism. The exhibition aspect of the event will also offer the chance for attendees to network and create business opportunities.

The event will also help promote the Africa Golf Centre of Excellence Programme, which seeks to establish three key pilot projects in Southern Africa, West Africa and East Africa thought public-private partnerships. The golf centre will promote golf as an Olympic sport, as well as encouraging development of the game in local communities.

Golf course architect Howard Swan is chairman of the Golf Consultants’ Association, and has helped launch the Africa Golf Centre of Excellence Programme.  

“There is a great chance for many interested parties throughout sub Saharan Africa to pool their expertise, their experience and their enthusiasm to grow the game at this grassroots level and to involve a host of communities which have had no such opportunity to do so to date,” Swan said. “More importantly, I feel that is areal opening to make an expanding game in Africa really work for those communities in reaching out and providing education and training for all involved. By doing so we must surely manage to make that Olympic ideal reachable to more.”

The Africa Golf Summit takes place from 9-11 September.