Phoenix 24
A Sinaloa-based academic is moving onto the international stage.
Los Mochis, March 2026
Researcher Hussein Muñoz Helú has been appointed national research coordinator for Mexico within the Sport Mapping Programme in Africa and Latin America, an initiative promoted by the UNESCO Chair for Sport, Development and Peace and Olympic Education. The appointment places a scholar from Universidad Autónoma de Occidente, Los Mochis campus, at the head of a project that will examine the role of sport in social development and peacebuilding.
According to the reports published on March 19, the programme is being implemented in Latin America for the first time after a decade of work in African countries. Mexico was incorporated alongside other countries in the region in a strategy designed to build national profiles on sports policy, physical activity and the social impact of sport in vulnerable contexts.
Muñoz Helú will coordinate a nationwide diagnostic study covering all 32 Mexican states. The research is expected to gather institutional data, official statistics and field evidence in order to produce a National Sport Profile that can be used by governments, federations, Olympic bodies, universities and civil society organizations.
The project is backed by UNESCO and the Adidas Foundation and is centered on how sport can function as a tool for social cohesion, inclusion and positive transformation. In that sense, the initiative is not limited to elite competition or high-performance sport, but is instead focused on the broader capacity of sport to intervene in areas marked by vulnerability, forced displacement and peacebuilding challenges.
Muñoz Helú, a full-time professor-researcher at UAdeO, has more than 18 years of academic work linked to Olympism and social sport studies. Reports also identify him as a Level 1 member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers and part of the Sinaloa System of Researchers and Technologists, with scientific publications in international journals.
The project formally began on Thursday, March 19, and is scheduled to continue through November 2026. The research team will include specialists from different academic institutions across the country, with the goal of producing a robust diagnosis that can later inform public policy and social intervention programmes.
The significance of the appointment goes beyond the local academic sphere. It places Mexico within a broader international effort to generate applied knowledge on sport, development and peace, while also projecting research produced in Sinaloa into wider circuits of cooperation and analysis.
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