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Background and relevance: Early identification of deficits in physical activity and motor skill performance is crucial given that it is essential for healthy lifestyles. Screening children for poor motor competence and fitness is even more important in developing countries because it may help influence behavior of children at risk of NCDs caused by physical inactivity while still in school. Directing resources towards preventing NCDs rather than cure is more cost effective especially for developing countries and low resourced areas. Low resourced communities provide suboptimal conditions for child development and are often associated with the lack of motor learning experiences.  Generally in most low economic settings, opportunities for motor acquisition and appropriate sports-oriented practices are unavailable leading to lower fitness levels and secondary health risks. There is a critical lack of representative, temporally sequenced data on physical activity and physical fitness measures in Sub Saharan Africa’s school-aged children and youth. Hence there is an urgent need to carry out representative studies in order to effectively describe and monitor physical fitness and motor performance over time in Africa.

Method: Given the importance of motor skill related fitness for children’s future physical activity and active play an international group of academics developed a standardized instrument—the PERF-FIT to assess motor skill related fitness worldwide in low resourced areas, and we are currently testing its validity and reliability in 5 African countries (South Africa, Ghana, Sudan, Tunisia, Nigeria). The PERF-FIT provides a much-needed measurement tool to support international monitoring and comparisons of motor development and anaerobic fitness in developing countries and areas with low resources. Data gathered will provide indicators for in early epidemiological studies and subsequent investigations.

Results and conclusion: Data collected so far will be presented to show validity and reliability of this new tool and the test items and its materials will be demonstrated. Comparison with other tools that evaluate motor skills and that identify child with atypical or delayed motor development will also be shown.  The test manual will be made available to down load at very low cost, so health professional can use it to characterize motor skill related fitness and to investigate potential factors that are associated with poor motor skills during critical periods across developmental time across African countries.