Koata continues COSAFA organising role
Mqondisi Dube | Saturday June 29, 2024 06:00
He has travelled to Gqeberha, South Africa (SA) where he is involved in the logistics for the regional tournament, which started on Wednesday. Koata has been part of the COSAFA since 2019 and has been involved in some of the sport’s high-profile tournaments, including the soccer World Cup. “I have been part of the COSAFA LOC since 2019 and during this period, I have been assigned different roles. Mostly, I deal with volunteer management, hospitality, and protocol. This [time] around in Gqeberha, I'm responsible for Volunteer Management and Guardian Safeguarding,” he said.
Koata said he has picked vital lessons, particularly from his involvement in the World Cup. “Because of my involvement with FIFA, and now COSAFA, I'm competent in the areas of event management, security as well as competitions. My roles in these major tournaments overlap with other functional areas, hence knowledge and expertise derived from these interactions is enormous. Remember, these are top-notch organisations with little or no room for errors, so whenever I am assigned a task, I execute it diligently and professionally,” he said. Koata has been involved in sport volunteerism since the 1980s and has seen his journey take a massive leap with his first involvement in the COSAFA Cup in Angola decades back. “My major breakthrough was when I did the COSAFA tournament in Angola in 2004. Since then, I have volunteered as a general volunteer and later elevated to LOCs such as COSAFA Metropolitan Under-19 2011 where I was in charge of volunteer management and training,” he said.
“I was part of the FIFA World Cup South Africa 2010 based in Rustenburg. I also took part in the Africa Youth Games, commonly known as Gaborone 2014, as part of the LOC. I volunteered in the Botswana Games from its inception until the last edition as part of the LOC. In 2014, I was invited to be part of the FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014 based at Maracana Stadium in Rio De Janeiro where I spent nine weeks. My main role there was to manage the Protocol and Hospitality Affiliates (FIFA major partners and sponsors). I was again invited by FIFA to be part of their team for the 2018 World Cup in Sochi, Russia, but did not go due to personal reasons,” he added.
In 2022, he headed to the Middle East, Doha in Qatar, where he was responsible for Marketing and Rights Delivery department. “Note that my area of study is marketing (Undergraduate Bachelor of Business Administration – Marketing) and later postgraduate degree in Master of Business Administration. I'm currently working on a legacy project inherited from Qatar, which will benefit a lot of young people in Botswana in general and the country as [a] whole,” Koata said.