Collaborative effort could tackle sponsorship issues

Jul 19, 2009 Sports

Says Sports Minister, Anthony

By Edison Jefford

Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Dr. Frank Anthony says that a greater collaborative effort between his Ministry and national sport associations is needed if the corporate giants are to show more interest in supporting local sport.
There has been a spate of national teams including athletic units that struggled to dispatch national teams to overseas assignments because of lack of sponsorship. The Minister was responding to Kaieteur News’ questions yesterday.
“I think some people are sceptical because of the way in which they are approached, but if we had a single systematic method of approaching sponsors, maybe we would have seen more results than the individualistic approach,” he said.
According to Anthony, there are some provisions under the National Sports Commission Act for tax waivers for companies that contribute to sport through the commission but associations do not use that route for funding.
He believes that that contribute to a level of scepticism since going to sponsors alone sort of opens the door for ambiguity. Anthony said that his Ministry would have to account for any monies that pass through its coffers.
“Once it’s a national team we want to support, but what we need is a data base of athletes so that we can know that they have fit a certain criteria and we can generate our efforts to our best athletes that have qualified,” Anthony indicated.
“We do not want athletes who do not meet standards taking away resources and sponsors know that. We want to focus on athletes that can really perform so that our processes can be really transparent,” the Minister pointed out.
Apart from two athletics team failing to compete internationally because of the shortages of funding, the national rugby union recently lamented the fact that they needed corporate support for their recently returned national U-19 team.
Anthony is of the view that national associations should corporate more with the Ministry in terms of the communicating in regards to representative national teams. He said that many national teams are unknown to the Ministry before they depart.
While associations want to maintain autonomy, the Minister said that that does not exists here because many of them end up turning to the Ministry for help, which stresses more the need for a collaborative relationship.
“There should be more consultation or discussion taking place between us and associations on the subject of national teams and sponsorship,” Anthony stated.

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