AfricaPress-Tanzania: SPECIAL Olympics Tanzania (SOT) and Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) are in the preliminary stages to sign working partnership with the Tanzania Scouts Association (TSA) for the sake of advancing youth games.
This was confirmed by SOT National Director Charles Rays who said once the partnership is sealed, the two parties will be able to conduct inclusive sporting activities.
“Our aim is to create a conducive working environment between us so that when they organise sport events, they should include athletes from Special Olympics for them to get an extra exposure. “We will also be inviting them whenever we are running sport activities and by doing that, skills of our youths will be promoted in one way or another,” remarked Rays.
Elaborating further, Rays noted that TSA does not have programmes which include disabled athletes in their sporting calendar as such, once the two sides enter into the cooperation, then people who are disabled including the intellectually challenged ones who are taken care by SOT will have a big room to engage in numerous sporting activities.
“As you know, people who are intellectually challenged like to take part in sporting events and most of them are able to learn fast different life skills if they are involved in sports. “The other thing we have seen from TSA is that the sport events they organise are similar to ours, hence the deal will strengthen further the working relationship between us,” he said.
On her part, a representative from TSA Elina Kitaly said they are also looking forward to partner with SOT in order for both parties to promote youth games together. “Our initial discussions over the partnership have progressed well to the extent that we are just waiting for the second phase of talks to see where we will reach,” she said.
SNF Project Officer Kelvin Mwise insisted that once the partnership gets underway, it will be easy for them to give Special Olympics athlete options of which sport discipline they would like to participate thereby simplifying their day to day works.
