22 Sep 2014

International Working Group on Women in sport (IWG) provides an opportunity for women to define opportunities to resolve challenges.

Speaking at the leadership handover the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture, Ruth Maphorisa said IWG was all about how stake holders make women participate in sport, how they overcome the challenges of women participation in sport, and women being accommodated to take part at the same level as men.

Maphorisa said IWG was not an organisation in the formal sense of having to conform to certain protocols, adding that traditionally in Setswana culture women find ways of supporting each other and that can be likened to IWG.

”It’s all about women seeing the need to come together to address issues that affect them,” she said.

She said as Botswana will be hosting the IWG conference in 2018, they are not going to repeat what happened in Finland because Botswana was different.

If they were to repeat what other countries had been doing, then there would be no need to host these conferences because people would not attend, she said.

Maphorisa further said as Botswana they wanted to do things that would attract a lot of people.

She said they want to leave a legacy that Botswana would be remembered for, adding that the conference was just an event but the process that would begin to unfold now until 2018 was all that mattered.

Maphorisa further said the greatest challenge that they had as they were hosting the conference was that they had a number of strategies and protocols that were coming to an end around 2015 like the Millennium Development Goals, 

She further said what was a challenge to Botswana was how they would take the movement forward in the next century, another challenge she said was influencing sustainable development in terms of women and sport beyond 2015 as Millennium Development Goals came to close.

 Maphorisa said their greatest achievement would be being able to influence whatever goals the United Nations family would come up with for the next century and they believed the four years would give them the opportunity.

The past IWG chairperson,  Raija Mattila from Finland said their mission and visit to Botswana was to hand over the leadership of IWG to Botswana. She said IWG was a working group that advocated for women and girls participation in sport and tried to promote gender equality.

Mattila said as a global network, people who were part of the network came from around the world, and she was confident that people will come in large numbers come 2018.

She said their experience in Botswana was worth it, and that back in her country people were saving money to come to Botswana.

“We have trust in the leadership here and we are happy the government of Botswana is supporting you,” she said.

Botswana National Sports Council, chairperson, Solly Reikeletseng said Botswana saw it fit to host the IWG conference because the country had been very aggressive in event -based tourism.

“There’s nobody who can do that better than the sporting fraternity, and we can beat anybody hands down in terms of bringing investments to Botswana,” he said.

Reikeletseng further said sport was able to sell anything more than any other industry and it contributed to Gross Domestic Product growth , adding that even on tourism, sport had been able to sell the country more than any other sector.

He said the other reason for bidding was to build an agenda for women in sport, and to emphasise that sport should be supported because sport was able to push the agenda that government wanted to pursue.  ENDS