02 Mar 2017

Township Rollers are scheduled to play against South African side, Platinum Stars in a HeForShe target 20 000 campaign on March 25.

The game will be played at the National Stadium and will be used to educate and encourage participation of players and fans to sign the United Nation HeForShe online campaign.

HeForShe is a solidarity campaign for the advancement of women initiated by UN Women.

Its goal is to engage men and boys as agents of change by encouraging them to take action against negative inequalities faced by women and girls.

The game was one of the initiative taken towards the achievement of target 20 000 that was set by Botswana’s HeForShe champion Solly Reikeletseng.

Speaking at the game launch, Reikeletseng said their commitment to HeForShe was ‘very solid’ given that their aim was to hit their target of 20 000 signatories.

He said Botswana has also made a commitment to be number one in Africa in terms of gender issues, adding that when Botswana started the HeForShe campaign it was number 56 in Africa and now the country seats on position three after their extensive involvement.

“Finishing as number one to us is not a big challenge, what is important is that we need to come up with programmes that will educate people to be part of the programme and we all know people love football. When we looked at the teams we have, Rollers seem to have a substantive number of supporters,” he said.  

Furthermore, he said he was happy Platinum Stars were one of the teams who showed a lot of interest to support their cause.

He said their intention was to make it an annual event with different teams and sporting code to get more numbers, adding that in the next five years they would want to have unprecedented numbers.

Township Rollers president, Jagdish Shah said their game against Platinum Stars was not about two teams playing, but its main target was to support the HeForShe initiative.

“I am so happy to be part of the great initiative. In 2018 as Botswana we are hosting an International Working Group on Women and Sport, so I think we should also show the rest of the world that as a country we have achieved our target,” he said.

Platinum Stars, chairperson Clifford Ramoroa said they were always ready to help Botswana in way their contribution was needed.

Ramoroa said gender equality was something at their heart and their academy was coached by a woman. 

He said they would bring their full squad to Botswana and would conduct some coaching clinics.a day before the game.

“When Jagdish invited us to the game, I asked him, what is in there for us, and he told me there was a programme on gender, but at the back of my mind what came out first was, who we are as the Bafokeng to refuse. Remember the Bafokeng belong here and we had some of the players from here and we appreciated that they took us somewhere.
So we have that   attachment with Batswana,” he said. ENDS