Give us Nuyo land & structure to establish Rwenzori High Altitude Sports Academy” Kasese Youth Ask Government

NEWS- After the climax of the Rwenzori Theluji Festival with the Tusker Lite Rwenzori Marathon, it became evident that Kasese people need to establish and maintain a high-altitude academy for talent identification and development in the Rwenzori Region.

The local people participated in the internal marathon tat took place in Kasese on the 2nd day of September 2023 with most gifts heading to Sebei region and first from the host district became 21st in the 42 KM race.

Speaking to the press conference at Shiloh Hotel in Kasese town, Mr. Kameli Zephaniia Bwambale, Director of Youth in Tourism & Community Tourism asked government to allocate the former National Union of Youth Organization (NUYO) land & structures in Kyanya- Maliba Sub County to youth in Tourism at Kasese Tourism Investors Forum and establish a high-altitude academy.

According to Kameli, the academy will spur talent development and help the people of Rwenzori to compete internationally and benefit from their talents.

“Rwenzori High Altitude Sports Academy will be Platform to enable youths to use sports as a means of developing themselves by getting involved them in regular purposeful activity and teaching them leadership and life skills”. “The Academy will achieve this by training coaches and volunteers from communities in the skills of coaching sports to young people and in using sport to teach life skills. The training programs at the academy will be developed by experts from the fields of sports, education, and health thus bridging them to elite sport” Kameli added.

In preparation of the Tusker Lite Rwenzori Marathon, The Kasese Tourism Investors Forum conduced a mock run and runners from the mock run were taken to the camp as an experiment for viability of the sports academy. The camp hosted 53 runners.

Alex Masereka who was one of those hosted at the camp improved his performance from being the 37th in the 42 KM in 2022 to being 21st in the second edition in 2023 which becomes a clear signal that if our local talent is sorted well, Rwenzori region will perform well in sports.

Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon described the run-up to the announcement of the final goals as “the most transparent and inclusive process in UN history.” Unlike the MDGs, which were written by a group of individuals at the UN headquarters, the sustainable development goals were created by a number of consultations.

Sport and development organizations held their own discussions on the topic, including through an e-debate on sportanddev.org. Much of the conversation focused on how to get sport’s contributions to development recognized in the SDGs. Influential organizations such as the International Olympic Committee – which has observer status at the United Nations – also lobbied for the inclusion of sport.

These efforts were a success, with the following paragraph being written on page 10 of the final outcome document, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”:

“We recognize the growing contribution of sport to the realization of development and peace in its promotion of tolerance and respect and the contributions it makes to the empowerment of women and of young people, individuals and communities as well as to health, education and social inclusion objectives.”

The proposed academy is inspired by the simple idea that every young person in Uganda has something to gain from having somewhere to go, something to do and someone to trust