30 May 2021

Some social media platforms on Saturday criticised the all men committee of Botswana Sport Volunteers Movement.

The movement held its elective general assembly in Gaborone on and all its six committee members were men.

A champion in women’s sport advocacy, Game Mothibi, said in an interview that she was hoping that sports people had moved ahead in terms of campaigns and gender balancing their committees.

She said the disappointing thing was how the movement regressed in women representation, adding that it was unfortunate to have a committee of all men when there was so much conversation going around on gender parity.

Mothibi said the outgoing chairperson, Keenese Katisenge-Tizhani, was influential when it came to pushing for gender balance.

She, therefore, said they expected to see 50 per cent representation on the new leadership through her influence.

Mothibi said since the chairperson would be nominated by Botswana National Sport Commission, she was however hopeful that Katisenge-Tizhani would influence the nomination for the chairperson to be a woman.

Sport in Botswana, she said, had a lot of trained, capable and willing women who could lead the movement.

“I truly believe a lot of Batswana would have been interested in helping grow the movement to great heights. The elections needed to be hyped so much, so that we will all be interested in knowing who won the elections,” she said.

WASBO marketing and publicity officer, Thulaganyo Retshabile, said women were drastically underrepresented at decision making levels, despite women representing half of the world’s population.

Women, she said, were also underrepresented in elected offices and even as voters, posing a major challenge to them in penetrating leadership structures.

Retshabile said studies indicated that the greatest limiting factor was lack of female candidates supply and this was witnessed over the weekend at sport movement AGM, where nominees were all male and mostly unopposed.

“We believe this is an emphasis on the massive task that we have as an organisation to continue with capacity building efforts and changing of mind sets. We need to encourage and support as well as empower more women to come forth and raise their hands to be counted. It should be a deliberate move to have them represented,” she said.

Furthermore, Retshabile said they needed to work on increasing their levels of confidence and belief in themselves and other women.

Men, she said, also needed to be taught that gender equality was also their mandate as they could not achieve this alone without women.

She emphasised that men needed to appreciate that they could increase the numbers if they worked together, noting that inclusion benefitted an organisation as whole from the different perspectives and abilities it brings.

As WASBO, she said, they advise the movement to work hard in ensuring women representation within their regional structures in order to increase the number of women qualifying to contest for positions.

“One of the observations we made over the weekend, while attending their AGM, is that their governance instruments were also somehow limiting the representation and we in addition propose a technical solution by them reviewing this governing instruments to be more accommodative and inclusive,” she said.

Retshabile said the sport movement should also work hand in hand with other organisations to address the sub- conscious bias existing among voters through changes in volunteer’s beliefs and loyalties.

”Our baseline survey results indicate that we are still at 19.5 per-cent of women representation in leadership positions, as such the results from the weekend AGM have not contributed to an increase in these statistics,” she said. ENDS