The NBA spent $104 million building a gleaming, high-end arena and sports complex in Kigali, Rwanda. But is there sufficient local basketball culture to fill it?
The Basketball Africa League’s flagship venue was born from Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s visit to a Toronto Raptor’s game. After the game, Kagame reportedly asked how much it would cost to build something like the Raptor’s arena in Kigali. And that is how the idea to seat the Basketball Africa League (BAL) in Rwanda apparently began.
Photo of BK Arena, by Christian Rebero Twahirwa on Unsplash
Meanwhile, Kagame’s regime faces accusations of backing militias committing atrocities in neighboring Congo.
As a result, the NBA has come under scrutiny for its partnership with Kagame. But this article isn’t about the NBA’s political partnerships and questionable due diligence practices.
This is about a more fundamental strategic mistake: how the league has failed to build the grassroots basketball culture it needs to sustain its African expansion, and why that is the real risk to everything they’re trying to build.
Fortunately, there’s a much better model that’s been playing out in Ward 7 of Washington DC for over a decade.Subscribed
How the NBA Got to Rwanda: Top-Down, Not Bottom-Up
A 2024 ESPN investigation titled “How the NBA Got Into Business With an African Dictator“ reveals that the NBA’s flagship BAL venue—the $104 million BK Arena in Kigali—was born out of a 2018 meeting between NBA executives and Rwandan President Paul Kagame. According to the ESPN article, the arena was built within a year at Kagame’s personal direction, with no visible public input or community consultation with Rwandans.
“You could see that his eyes lit up,” said NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum, referring to Kagame’s reaction when they discussed the idea of the arena.
Meanwhile, Kagame’s regime has been accused supporting the M23 rebel group in the Democratic Republic of Congo. M23 is accused of repression, torture, disappearances, rape, and violence. Despite this, the NBA has embraced Kagame as a key partner. The NBA appointed his former lead strategist, Clare Akamanzi, as CEO of NBA Africa.
And the NBA will host all BAL championships in Rwanda through at least 2026.
The NBA defends its choice on the grounds that Kigali is clean, orderly, and secure—but secure for whom? Many Rwandan citizens can’t afford the tickets. They haven’t been engaged in the planning. And the development boom around the BK Arena—luxury restaurants, hotels, and retail—seems built for foreign visitors, not everyday Rwandans.
This begs the question: who is supposed to frequent the venue and enjoy the surrounding economic infrastructure remains unclear (a recent conversation I had with a few Rwandans on this matter said it was built for “you people,” meaning, international visitors who are already basketball fans).
For the NBA, this seems to be a strategic—and avoidable—misstep. It threatens to position the organization as just another multinational that extracts value from Africa. And it misses a huge opportunity to build a true culture of basketball on the continent.
Luckily for the NBA, there are proven models to address this oversight, and it’s not too late to course correct.
A Better Model: Building Culture of Baseball in DC’s Ward 7
When I first moved to Washington DC’s Ward 7 in 2013, I witnessed something remarkable happening in one of the district’s most underserved neighborhoods.
The Washington Nationals Major League Baseball (MLB) team opened their Youth Baseball Academy a few blocks from my house. But the NBA didn’t just build a state-of-the-art facility in Ward 7. They have spent years building a baseball culture where none really existed before.
They do this through sports-based positive youth development.
Ward 7 faces serious challenges: it’s a food desert with limited grocery access; gun violence that sometimes forces the Academy into lockdown; and persistent poverty. But it’s also home to warm, resilient communities and beautiful tree-lined streets where families have deep roots.
The key insight: there was very little baseball tradition in Ward 7, just like there’s very little basketball culture in Rwanda. The Nationals had to create demand for their sport from scratch.
They started by listening…for years
“From 2005 to 2012, it took a lot of time to figure out where to build, what to build, and how to fundraise for it,” explains Charlie Sperduto, Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy. The process began when then-DC Mayor Anthony Williams insisted that any financing for the new Nationals venue must include a youth development center in Ward 7.
But the real work started after the facility opened in 2012. “The Nats handed me a wiffle ball bat and set and said ‘here’s some equipment, start a program,'” Charlie recalls. “I’ve spent every part of the decade plus building relationships and opening doors to schools and violence prevention groups to become a community hub.”
This means forming relationships with people who are in the lives of Ward 7’s youth: School administrators, community associations, parents, and teachers. Even neighbors, like me, who are recruited as mentors in the afterschool programming for the academic enrichment of the Academy’s scholar-athletes.
The Nats Youth Baseball Academy built baseball culture by addressing real community needs first
Charlie learned that youth baseball “was never really a thing in this immediate community.” So instead of forcing the sport on kids who didn’t care about baseball (initially), they built programming around what families actually needed.
The Academy includes:
- A teaching kitchen and weekly farmers market addressing the food needs of the community
- An organic garden producing 100+ pounds of food annually, also addressing food needs
- Academic support and enrichment through their BASE after-school program
- Free equipment, uniforms, and programming to eliminate financial barriers to participation
“If we just did baseball and softball, we’d be doing the community a disservice,” Charlie explains. They partnered with groups like DC Central Kitchen and Children’s National Hospital to provide “food as medicine” courses, distributed hundreds of turkeys during holidays, and created COVID resource networks during the pandemic. The Academy has become part of the social fabric in the community.
The Youth Baseball Academy created pathways to ownership
Today, over 20 Academy alumni are playing college baseball, and 10 have returned as paid staff. “A lot of our staff, especially summer staff, are coaches from the community and kids who matriculated through the program,” Charlie notes. This creates what he calls “a sense of belonging and membership” that goes far deeper than transactional programming.
They measured belonging, self-efficacy, and social/emotional learning, not just participation
Rather than just counting participants, the Academy tracks social-emotional learning outcomes. “90% of our kids enrolled in BASE increased capacity in social/emotional learning: self management, academic self efficacy, social skills,” Charlie reports. “Our ultimate success metric: social/emotional learning. Feeling belonging, that they matter, that they’re loved.”
The result? The Nationals won the 2024 Allan H. Selig Award for Philanthropic Excellence from MLB. More importantly than accolades, though, they created genuine community ownership and a thriving baseball culture in a place where it didn’t exist before.
The NBA’s Real Opportunity
The NBA’s ambitions in Africa are valid and promising.
But arenas alone won’t create basketball culture. If the league wants to build something that lasts beyond Kagame’s presidency, it must shift from transactional, top-down development to patient, bottom-up culture building. A fantastic way to do it would be to start the kind of youth-based development programming that the MLB has built in Ward 7.
That means:
- Building relationships before building facilities. As Charlie learned, “personal connection is the foundation for accountability.” Public-private partnerships can’t shortcut building local trust or investing in sports culture.
- Addressing community needs first, sports second. In DC, that looked like food access and academic support. In Kigali, it might look completely different, but the NBA won’t know until they ask.
- Creating pathways for community members to eventually run programming themselves. Not just appointing executives, but developing local coaches, administrators, and leaders from within.
- Making everything financially accessible while building demand. Free programming, free equipment, patient investment in growing interest in the sport itself.
- Measuring belonging and culture development, not just attendance. The best indicator of success is whether basketball becomes something communities want and value. And how participating in the sport helps develop youth as thriving, healthy, productive members of society.
The NBA has the resources to build more than arenas. It can build ecosystems of belonging, development, and basketball culture that will outlast any political leader. But only if it does the patient work of earning community trust and creating genuine demand first.
The bottom line.
Building a $104 million arena in a place with little basketball culture is like building an expensive monument to commemorate missed opportunity. And monuments don’t generate sustainable revenue or lasting impact.
The NBA still has time to course-correct. The question is whether it will choose the hard work of community-driven culture building over the easy path of elite partnerships.
