The Summer kids Marathon enters its third edition on the 20th of April 2024, and this year, the focus is on education as it is on promoting fitness.
Organisers of the event say this year’s event will be held under the theme ‘Unleashing a smart generation.’ The great idea is to promote the importance of academics and encourage participants to prioritize education.
This is just one of the many initiatives the organisers are putting in place as they seek to make the marathon more appealing and meaningful. “This marathon is not only for running and recreation but we also want to talk about academics as we desire to see these kids excel to the best of their abilities,” marathon co-founder and organiser Martin Fani reveals.
‘Write a letter to your friend’ is one of these new initiatives. Through this initiative, kids will be encouraged to write letters to their friends telling them about Summer kids Marathon.
Writing these letters is expected to keep the kids busy while waiting for the event in April. It also gives them a chance to put to use the comprehension and letter skills they learn at school.
“This initiative is expected to run from April. At the moment, we are still in talks with potential sponsors for this campaign. Once settled, we will give full details on how it will run. On the day of the event, we will read best selected letters to all the kids and give out goodies to best writers,” he explains.
For this edition, organisers say they are targeting 1000 participants. This will be double the number of last edition’s participants which stood at 500. According to Fani, the intention is to ensure more children can participate in the event.
He explains that the event has attracted more interest since the past editions. However, due to the limit in number of participants, there was little or no space for those outside Gaborone and surrounding areas.
“Our intention is to ensure the event is open to all kids, even those who are disabled and less-privileged. We are therefore appealing to companies to adopt and sponsor less privileged kids to be part of this event. To make this a reality, we are planning to host an out-reach tour across different places to make parents and organisations aware of this marathon. We also intend to have a cleaning campaign in every village we visit,” Fani says.
Unlike previous editions where parents ended taking the limelight away from kids, organisers say this one will also be better coordinated.
“We are going to govern parents more this time around. We understand they mean well and want to ensure their kids’ safety and we will not take that away from them. However, they end up mixing too much and stealing the kids spotlight which we want to avoid. We are also going to create time intervals between categories to allow every category to shine unlike previously where they all ran together,” Fani says.
