Para sports project to be launched in Benin
21.08.2016
The West African country will launch their third project to promote Para sports in November 2016, thanks to the support of the Agitos Foundation.
Benin’s talent identification programme is amongst the 33 projects from around the world that the Agitos Foundation, the development arm of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), will support through the latest edition of its Grant Support Programme (GSP).
Ever since the launch of the GSP in 2013, it has made EUR 650,000 available each year to the IPC membership for awareness campaigns, education, training, research and equipment in both summer and winter sports.
Benin Paralympic Committee will launch their third project funded by the Agitos Foundation in November 2016 to follow up the success from the previous campaigns, maintaining their place on #TeamAgitos.
“Through this new project we hope to detect new young talents in ten towns of Benin,” said Benin Paralympic Committee (BPC) General Secretary and project lead Georges Seriki.
“The successful application of our [third] project was very satisfying. We believe that the Agitos Foundation is a credible institution, which helps the less developed National Paralympic Committees to attain a certain level of development through the projects it supports.
“We want to create a pool of talents and provide them with the necessary sporting material.”
“The projects to raise awareness of Para sports in Benin in 2014 and 2015 helped establishing regional structures and identifying new athletes.”
This third project will focus on athletics.
“We will provide sports equipment, either weights or javelins, to the participants. They will then receive special monitoring over the coming years,” said Seriki.
Seriki and his project team have set clear goals.
“We want to strengthen the foundations by selecting new talents,” he said.
“As of long term objectives we hope that we can send some athletes to Tokyo 2020.”
Apart from discovering new talents, the BPC has another mission.
“We want to spread the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Impairment in Benin,” he said.
The support by the GSP and the Agitos Foundation is crucial.
“For us this project is very important because it allows us to follow up from our previous projects and work on the current one as part of our [long term] strategic plan,” Seriki said.
“Thanks to the Agitos Foundation we will be able to follow the pool of athletes that we will select by organising different training camps.”
The 2016 GSP brings the number of Para sport development projects supported to 126 over four editions, touching communities and athletes all around the world with more than EUR 2.5 million of investment.