Indian Embassy offers scholarships to Basketball
Young women under the Basketball wing will benefit from five scholarships, courtesy of the Indian Embassy.
This was revealed recently at the basketball event meant to celebrate women, as the month of March aimed at recognising successes of women under the theme ‘Gender equality today for a sustainale tomorrow’. Chairperson of Women’s commission at Botswana Basketball Association, Boitumelo Bante tells The Midweek Sun Sport that they held this occasion to Celebrate women and impart them with defense skills, to protect themselves as women are faced with problems of Gender Based Violence (GBV) problems that escalate on a daily basis.
They partnered with Sensei Jones from Active Moves who demonstrated Defense skills to give the ladies basic skills on how to protect themselves against violence. Furthermore, they also had a Fitness session by Active Moves, to prepare them for the next season.
“We want women to be fit as we have abstained from sports for almost the past two and half years so we needed to help them to keep fit and ready for the next season as we would soon start our league,” said Bante emphasizing that Basketball has not started the league yet, and so this could really help them for the coming season.
Available teams at the event included, Mystic UB realistic, Police V Basketball, BDF V basketball, Dolphins Albatross and Botswana Bowling Club. They also had an opportunity to engage with the spouse to the high commissioner of India, Dr Upma Ranjan who inspired them with a motivational talk. Dr Ranjan encouraged the ladies to keep on fighting for everything in life as they are leaders of tomorrow. She reiterated that despite being faced with many challenges as women, they should rather be bold enough to protect their children and try to fight GBV which is almost eminent in every household especially in this era of Covid-19. She is of the view that, back then people would spend their time at sports grounds and this could have been the reason that GBV was not as high as people had something to keep them busy.
Bante said partnering with the Indian Embassy was a life changing moment. “We had zero budget when we planned this event but the Indian embassy came to our rescue through their Women’s Commission and pledged to give five scholarships to the girl child,” she says explaining that these scholarships will benefit the female youth up to the age of 35-years-old.
“Young women of Botswana, especially under the Basketball wing will benefit from these scholarships which include; undergraduate, graduate and post graduate programmes. This is a really good move from the Indian embassy,” says Bante.
She adds that they anticipate an increase in women in Basketball in Botswana as they currently have only four in the league. She admits that they are faced with challenges including lack of sponsorship which leads to lack of funds to maintain the teams, family commitments such as child bearing, marriage, and gender based violence, which eventually render women incapable to play especially if they can’t balance family life with sports.
“We are looking for individuals or companies to partner with to have an annual conference to empower women to step up from these challenges and also be counted in, and enable them to follow their dreams in sports than succumb to these challenges,” says Bante.
They are also hopefully planning for a 5 on 5 tournament for under 18 girls as a way of building interest within the sport and also growing the numbers of women in Basketball. “We want to start motivating them to commit to Basketball when they are still young, so we will hopefully have a bigger audience than before.
As it has been too long without playing, some of our girls have succumbed to teenage pregnancy because there was no sports and there was nothing to keep them away from these social ills, hence we need to break the silence now and build our sport again,” says Bante.