Sports and Recreation Minister, Kofi Adams, has laid emphasis on the investment of grassroots sports in Ghana.
Grassroots sports serve as the breeding ground for future athletes. Many actors in the sporting industry often lament the apparent neglect of the nurturing of talents at the early stages.
One of the most notable banes of grassroots sports is financial investment—though interventions have been made by the Ghana Football Association (GFA) in recent times and other bodies (local and international), much is left to be desired.
Kofi Adams, in an exclusive interview with Nana Darkwa Gyasi on Max TV, explained the need for intentional investment into talents, facilities, and training professionals.
Ghana has no shortage of talents when it comes to sports, but what are they when there are not adequate professional trainers and state-of-the-art infrastructure?
Talents
“Investment in grassroots sports where the talent would be spotted and sustained training. It is not like you spot them and leave them. There must be a sustained programme to assist them to train. This would mean that providing facilities.”
Infrastructure
“We should not just be constructing facilities. Every facility we construct must come with a management board that manages these facilities so that they serve the purpose for which they were constructed.”
Trained Professionals
“It must be an appropriate investment in an athlete who would train from one Olympics to another. That is the only way we produce persons who would perform, so we want to achieve all these in four years, which may not be enough, but at least we would have set an agenda towards doing that, i.e., we promised that we must establish a university to train the professionals who will help these talents because if the talents exist and you don’t have the human resources to train the talents, the talents cannot reach higher.”
