University of Technology (UTech) appears to be on the verge of getting a US$150,000 ($13 million) grant to develop “sports business value chains” in Jamaica.

The grant, approved two weeks ago by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), is aimed at “the extraction of increased economic value from Jamaica’s competitive advantage in the area of Sport, particularly Track and Field”.

The non-reimbursable funds to be issued under a small enterprise development facility is to be pooled with an additional US$66,000, which UTech will have to find, bringing the total project funding to US$216,000.

However, UTech’s Professor Rosalea Hamilton said that this is a smaller than anticipated budget, so the project will have to be scaled down.

The original proposal projected a US$583,518 investment.

In the project description posted on its website, the IDB said the UTech project would involve conducting a needs assessment, while “training programmes and capacity building will be undertaken for sports entrepreneurs and the knowledge environment for sports businesses will be enhanced”.

“The local sports industry will begin to realise its true economic potential,” the IDB said.

In its rationale for the sport entrepreneurship project, UTech’s development office said that the top 102 elite athletes of Jamaica with their handlers generate foreign earnings in excess of US$44 million in 2007, an annual average of US$217,844 per person”.

However, national sport agencies, associations and support organisations are unable to help sport, particularly elite sport, to deliver products and services that are in demand internationally.

“Therefore this project seeks to develop commercially viable sport enterprises and clusters, and seeks to provide financial and technical assistance to build individual and organizational capacity among sports entrepreneurs, athletes, trainers, managers and other support functions,” said UTech’s proposal.

One key approach will be the examination and bench marking of one of Jamaica’s most successful and internationally acclaimed clubs; Maximising Velocity and Power (MVP) Track and Field Club, which has Asafa Powell and Shellyann Fraser-Pryce as members.

Local universities, such as UTech, have become more involved in sports development, having started giving academic scholarships to athletes, who previously would have sought an education overseas, where sports scholarships are more common.

UTech boasts that over the past three years its athletes alone have “accounted for over 51 per cent of Jamaica’s medal placements”.