Batswana shun BNOC fundraising efforts

SMS campaign raises only P29 000 against a P5.5 million target

Botswana National Olympic Committee’s ( BNOC) efforts to raise funds for the Olympics bound team are going at a slow pace, if the negligible number of donations made from the SMS Donation Campaign are anything to go by.

Though BNOC does have a budget strictly set aside for the Tokyo games, numerous initiatives were put in place to raise funds in order to supplement the already available money for the games. The SMS Donation campaign has so far not yielded enough funds since it was launched three years back. With the SMS costing only P5, expectation was that by this time the campaign would have raised thousands of pulas, if not millions. In the wake of this, BNOC went an extra mile and introduced one other initiative this year, which is the United for BW Sport Campaign.

“The SMS Donation Campaign has managed to receive 5774 donations which equate to a total amount of P28 870 prior to the revenue split. Mind you these are collective figures from the day of inception way back in 2019. With respect to the United for BW Sport Campaign, we are currently collating the figures and shall share with the public in due course,” said BNOC Strategy and Business Development Manager, Baboni Khupe in a brief Interview. At some point BNOC’s efforts to raise funds for the Olympics team were boosted by Mascom Wireless, which injected P200 000 in early 2020. Despite a low number of donations trickling in, the BNOC does not want to give up as the campaign is expected to be concluded after the Olympics in August.