Nairobi — In a bid to ensure Kenya enters as many teams as possible in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, the government in collaboration with respective federations and the National Olympic Committee of Kenya (NOCK) will facilitate funds for teams that will compete in the qualifiers.

This was announced on Tuesday by the Cabinet Secretary (CS) for Sports, Ambassador Amina Mohamed while opening the sports marketing workshop organized by the NOCK) in Nairobi where all the federations attended.

The CS' sentiment comes after a number of national teams have struggled to raise funds for qualifiers with the national women's rugby team, the Kenya Lionesses and their counterparts from the volleyball team, Malkia Strikers being victims.

"We had requested that federations present their funding proposals before the end of the year and most them have done that, we will be looking at those proposals and they should not expect what they asked for, we are going to rationalize and make sure everybody is given what is needed and not what they asked for," the CS stated.

Her sentiments were echoed by the NOCK treasurer Anthony Kariuki, who said they presented the budget to the Ministry of Sports and agreed the government should assist federations in terms of funding to ensure they do not miss the qualifiers.

"We have planned adequately and presented our budgets one of the largest item in the budget is the qualification procedures and we have agreed that clearly the government will assist in qualification, what the CS said is that we are going to relook at the budgets that were presented, rationalize them so that we can reason together with the federations and that is a key thing and once we tell them federations can work backwards," Kariuki underscored.

Kariuki also underlined that teams that have already qualified, like the Malkia Strikers, Kenya Lionesses, Kenya Sevens and a huge chunk of runners should also be facilitated for ample preparations.

"We believe qualification is a key process, the teams that have already qualified have a serious budget in preparations so we want to concentrate on them to prepare adequately so that they can be ready for the games," the NOCK treasurer underscored.

Acting Secretary General Francis Mutuku noted that NOCK will start building capacity within the sports federation and by extension within the sports building fraternity in Kenya.