Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand have joined forces to form the Global Alliance for Female Athletes (GAFA), a groundbreaking initiative aimed at advancing female health and performance in sports worldwide. The alliance brings together leading health practitioners and sports scientists to help female athletes overcome prevalent health issues and reach their full sporting potential.
The newly formed alliance has launched a website, YourGAFA.com, where athletes, coaches, and support staff can freely access world-leading evidence, performance insights, and best-practice information in one centralized location.
Dr. Rachel Harris, Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) Female Performance Health Initiative Project Lead, emphasized the importance of this collaboration: “On a global scale, health literacy around female-specific conditions is poor. This gap in knowledge, coupled with wide-spread misinformation, means athletes often miss the early warning signs and go undiagnosed or are inadequately treated for conditions like endometriosis or dysmenorrhea. Athletes are then forced to miss training days which reduces their chances of making competition or in some cases sees them leave the sport altogether. Our goal is to change this.”
The initiative addresses a significant disparity in sports research and education between male and female athletes. Dr. Helen Fulcher, High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) Athlete Performance Support Lead, noted that “the prioritisation of women’s health is long overdue” and explained that “female athlete research, knowledge and education lags that of male athletes globally so bringing together international expertise will help change this inequality.”
She added: “The benefits are broad for female athletes and their coaches. They will be able to access and utilise the most up-to-date information that is not always available in a digestible or translatable form. Every nation will go on to implement the knowledge in specific ways – those are some of the national secrets to achieving success – however, having a baseline of collective public information grows the world stage for all.”
In a significant shift from previous approaches, the alliance plans to tackle future projects collaboratively rather than in isolation. Amber Donaldson, United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) Sports Medicine Vice President, stated: “This collaboration, bringing expertise and initiative in the space of women’s health and performance together, will allow us to move the needle faster and more efficiently than if we were attempting to do this on our own.”
Looking to the future, Dr. Richard Burden, UK Sport Institute’s Female Athlete Health and Performance Lead, expressed hope for expanding the alliance: “If we can raise the awareness and prioritisation of female athlete health and performance in all corners of the globe then GAFA will have been a success.”
The alliance brings together four major sporting organizations: the Australian Institute of Sport, which leads the Australian high performance system and established the Female Performance Health Initiative in 2019; the UK Sports Institute, which provides science, medicine, technology, and engineering services to Olympic and Paralympic sports; High Performance Sport New Zealand, which partners with National Sporting Organizations to enable world-class performances; and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, which serves as both the National Olympic Committee and National Paralympic Committee for the United States.
