Sports Policy in focus this year – Minister Ramson Jr

The long-awaited National Sports Policy is set to get some attention and possible completion in 2023, according to Culture, Youth and Sport Minister Charles Ramson Jr, who made this revelation last Saturday during the second edition of the National Sports Conference, which was hosted at the National Cultural Center.
“That’s going to be big on our objectives to achieve this year,” the Sport Minister disclosed to athletes, officials, administrators and other stakeholders in the sports fraternity on Saturday last.
Ramson Jr went on to list various reasons why the completion of the Policy had been put off, one of which entailed the need to include the National Sports Academy programme.
Ramson explained, “And I put it on this year, for 2023, because we could not reasonably and sensibly complete a Sports Policy that did not include first a sound analysis of where we were. We needed to take stock of where we were as a country, having frank discussion of where we are falling short and what should that policy contain.
We could not also produce a policy that did not contain the National Sports Academy,” Ramson added.
The National Sports Policy is a project that Ramson Jr. inherited at the change of Government in 2020. Prior to that, the Policy’s draft was first released on June 20, 2018 by then Minister with responsibility for Sport, Dr George Norton. The Policy was a focal campaigning point in the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) manifesto back in 2015. A year after its release in 2018, Minister Norton had exclusively shared with Guyana Times Sport that the policy was ‘almost there’. However, no other progress was disclosed since then.