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Gender agenda as Athletics Kenya start on how to improve boy-child in sports

Athletics Kenya has set out to address the discrepancies in gender balance in every competition to avoid gender imbalance in the country.

Speaking in Uasin Gishu during the opening of five junior camps in the region which have been dominated by girls, the federation’s Youth and Development chairman Barnaba Korir said that the federation is working hard to ensure that they meet the gender balance in all aspects.

He said that what has happened is that in the beginning, in athletics, girl-child was lagging behind and the state saw the need to empower them because of the discrepancies that were there before where there was a big gap for so many years without realizing the effects that will have on boy-child.

“In some of these camps, we realized that we have more girls than boys and then the success story is in girls. Even looking at the world championships and Olympics Games, many medals won by Kenya were from women. Even in marathons currently, women are doing better than men. In general terms within the country, there is a lagging behind of boy-child and that is something we need to start focusing on so that we don’t create a gap between the two genders,” said Korir.

He said that it is important to now look at how they can help the boys so that they can match with the girls.

“For athletics it will be easy to bring both boys and girls at par and to do that it is to select the team and encourage more boys participation. The world wants equality in participation and in some instances it has been achieved because we don’t want to create a bad impression on boys. They have to go together,” he said, adding that even during World Athletics elections, the number of men and women was at 50/50 and they wanted that percentage to be equal. And because we are a developing country, it will be easy to change the scale.

“We want both genders to be treated equally during competition and elections. We don’t want people to think that we are biased,” he added.

While opening the camps at Chepsaita, Kapkoimur, Kapsisiwa, Lelmolok and Simat, he said that the federation initiated the program that every school holiday the juniors enjoy training

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