Maureen Awori comes from Tororo district in eastern Uganda, where a river separates the villages of Malawa A and B.
She shared during Uganda Aquatics (UAq) extraordinary assembly held on Saturday in Lugogo that “throughout the year children from both villages converge at the river to compete in swimming activities for leisure and my father at times is a referee.”
“It is a big river and probably unsafe. But I have urged them to embrace swimming as a sport and I wonder how they can be helped to achieve the right training and standards,” she said.
While it was an intriguing tale, UAq president Moses Mwase agreed that it is not uncommon to “see kids jump into lakes or rivers all over Uganda.”
“What we need is to mobilize these numbers. There is a lot of potential out there but we need to be careful about how we bring it out,” he said.
The assembly was to bring stakeholders up to speed with what UAq is doing to fulfill the registration requirements stipulated in the National Sports Act 2023. One of the requirements is that for sports organization to be recognized as federations they must have activities in 75 percent of the districts in Uganda.
To achieve this, UAq is one of the federations that has established regional representatives who are in turn working with sports officers, led by their chairman Mustapha Nsubuga, to spread activities in various districts – a move, one of the delegates from Soroti, John Francis Olupot supported “because sports officers have experience in implementing a lot of plans.”
Awori’s cry resonated with that of experienced coach Abel Ddamulira, who said “Africa Aquatics is focusing on utilizing the existing water bodies to promote open water swimming in various countries.”
“It should be an option for us too because you cannot promote swimming (in the pool) across the country yet the federation itself has no pool of its own,” Ddamulira added.
A training pool of three or four lanes could costs no lower than Shs180m. Imagine having them in over 100 districts.
Pauline Nankabirwa, from Masaka, agrees with Ddamulira as “many schools in my area are bordered by lakes. If we can demarcate where we can swim from and also train regional coaches or teachers, we can spread aquatic disciplines.”
Olupot stressed that headteachers and councillors are vital constitutencies that UAq should train too if they want to implement programmes smoothly.
Councillors are elected local government leaders that provide the bridge between the community and local authorities, managing public services, shaping local policy, and addressing resident concerns.
“Those ones are problematic if they don’t understand what you are doing and can discourage parents from allowing their children to participate in activities,” said Olupot, whose colleague from Soroti Moses Okwalinga advocated for “regional committees to support the regional representatives.”
Media personnel Patrick Kawaii believes UAq should “empower commissions like the technical one to have senior coaches develop a curriculum” that can be used in capacity building initiatives.
With pools costing a fortune, Rubanda’s delegate Bright Tumuhaise believes UAq can “work hand in hand with hotels in various districts to establish training and competition grounds.”
“After that you can introduce district competitions starting from primary school levels.”