Honorable Presidents, Secretary Generals, Distinguished Delegates, Invited Guests, Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good morning.
This is a Special Occasion to come together, first as a Family and, most importantly, as part of our good Governance practice in accordance to our constitutional requirement.
We have come to the end of another exciting business year, a year your Executive Board took advantage to build on the transformation gains established in the preceding years.
Indeed, the Executive Board strategic direction at beginning of the year was to sustain these gains, expand our program offerings, enhance and deepen strategic partnerships and promote our athletes’ welfare support, among other developmental goals.
Being cognizant of the ever changing and demanding nature of our own and, global sporting environment, especially on the athlete, we up-scaled our investment on tailor made trainings for capacity building.
These trainings were aimed at equipping the athletes and their support system, including administrators, with requisite skill- and mental sets to perform optimally and cope with any pressures on their pathway.
This year, we were operating under a very distressed economic situation at the national level, coupled with the year being a national General Elections season.
To mitigate the Government’s temporary cessation of any funding to sports operations, as a number of you know, we extended, over and above, the usual federations’ grants, some financial support to federations participating in various international events.
We have also continued our robust engagement with various stakeholders, which we mapped out as strategic to our developmental vision.
These include national and county governments, diplomatic circles and, even international partners- all these with a long term focus on preparing a formidable Team Kenya to future major Games like Paris 2024 Olympics.
I am confident this Assembly fully appreciates and supports such initiatives.
On another key area, we remain extremely concerned with wrangling within sports bodies to the detriment of athletes’ careers.
We have taken extraordinary steps to enhance our Sports Dispute resolution by engaging with them, in conjunction with their IFs and other governing authorities.
I am looking forward to the day we shall be rid of these few sports bodies that derail athletes’ advancement by engaging and escalating unnecessary management and leadership disputes.
We now have two active engagements to restore smooth running of involved federations undertaken by committees of some of the Executive Members.
Distinguished Delegates, Colleagues and friends,
Allow me to sincerely thank your impressive collaboration during this year in taking our sports and, indeed, athletes’ welfare to the next level.
In similar fashion, let me, in equal measure, extend another invitation to you for partnership in the year ahead, which will definitely, be even busier than the one under review.
Before I conclude my remarks, I would like to mention by, way of reminder that, everyone here must undertake and commit to play a proactive role as the country battles the menace of doping.
We laud and support the government’s leadership role to curb and stop the scourge and urge all of us to make anti-doping a central message in all your communications until we win the war conclusively.
I thank you all for your listening and wish you great festivities ahead of a Merry Christmas and a Happy, prosperous 2023 sporting year.
