This year, sport expects to receive P160 million, a similar amount that the sport's mother body, the Botswana National Sport Commission (BNSC), got in 2024. The budget, which has been around P100 million per year since 2018, only registering a significant increase during 2024 due to preparations for the Olympic Games held in Paris, France. At the moment, sport lives on hand to mouth with very little leg room to manoeuvre. As a result, some sport codes are forced to abandon international trips, or cut back on their activities. The total sum of all this is that sport development suffers. Finance is central to the growth of sport and lack of proper funding is, therefore, retrogressive. Now that the government 'cake' keeps shrinking or is static, there is a need for the various sport disciplines to work on widening their revenue streams.
Some like football receive generous sponsorship from the corporate world, but still, that has proved insufficient. It is clear that the government grant is not enough to feed all sport codes, which calls for aggressive marketing and thinking to add new funding avenues. The story has probably remained the same for ages, with the more than 40 BNSC codes scouring more or less the same market to augment the government subvention. They literally knock at the same door and its now too predictable where they will go. If it’s not FNB, it’s Mascom, DTCB or Orange.
