The International Council of Traditional Sports and Games (ICTSG) was established with a clear and comprehensive mandate: to preserve, promote, and develop traditional sports and games as expressions of living cultural heritage. To fulfill this mandate, ICTSG operates through six core objectives.

Core Objective 1: Documentation and Knowledge Preservation

ICTSG maintains the world's most comprehensive online encyclopedia of traditional sports and games, cataloguing over 160 disciplines from every inhabited region. Each entry includes the sport's historical origins, geographic distribution, rules and techniques, cultural significance, the communities associated with it, and its current risk of disappearance.

Documentation is done with communities, not merely about them. Community consent, participation, and ownership are central to every project.

Core Objective 2: Advocacy for Policy Recognition

ICTSG engages with UNESCO, the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee, and national ministries to advocate for formal recognition of traditional sports as intangible cultural heritage, inclusion in school physical education curricula, allocation of public funding, and engagement of traditional sports communities in sports governance.

Core Objective 3: Elevation Through the SRETS Framework

ICTSG's SRETS (Six-Stage Elevation Framework for Traditional Sports) provides a structured pathway from community documentation to UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage listing. The six stages are: Identify, Validate, National, Regional, International, and Heritage. SRETS has been applied to traditional sports from South Asia, Central Asia, West Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Core Objective 4: Capacity Building

ICTSG builds institutional capacity of National Chapters and Regional Bodies through training workshops, technical assistance, mentoring, and resource development. More than 50 National Chapters are now active, from Mongolia to Namibia to Papua New Guinea.

Core Objective 5: Celebration and Global Visibility

The International Day of Traditional Sports and Games (August 14) is celebrated annually in more than 90 countries. The World Martial and Vigorous Culture Festival (WMVC) and regional festivals organized through National Chapters extend the celebration of traditional sports worldwide.

Core Objective 6: Research and Academic Engagement

ICTSG fosters research partnerships with universities and research institutions studying traditional sports. The organization supports publication of research, facilitates access to its documentation archive, and engages scholars in policy advocacy.

These six objectives are unified by a single vision: a world in which every traditional sport and game is preserved, celebrated, and available to future generations as a living expression of their cultural identity.