Ecaleni women’s organisation wins gold award
The Tembisa Women’s Games (TWG) won an award under the category of Social Transformation for sub-category sport and recreation.
Thembisa Women’s Games (TWG) based in Ecaleni Section won an award at the Gauteng Premier’s Service Excellence Awards.
They won in the category for social transformation in the sub-category sports and recreation.
TWG is a sport organisation that focuses on sport development and improvement. It was established in 2012 by Nthabiseng Morata.
Morata said, “This initiative is one among many in the quest to contribute to nation building and community development.”
“The organisation focuses on increasing the participation and involvement of both young and old people in sport and recreation activities. It also reduces the high risk of them being involved in using drugs, alcohol abuse, crime, teenage pregnancy and many more,” said Morata.
She explained that they host off-season tournaments and school holiday programmes for different sporting codes which include netball, soccer, tennis and chess.
The Gauteng Premier’s Service Excellence Awards acknowledge individuals and organisations that are making outstanding contributions to their community. These individuals demonstrate how people with passion and determination can use their lives to make a difference in their community.
“Being nominated and recognised by the Premier was a blessing to us, but winning the award pushed us to work even harder to develop our community. We are grateful and honoured to receive a gold award,” explained Morata.
She said this award showed them they were recognised as people who devoted their time to make a change in their community. Morata added that the Tembisa Women’s Games do not plan to stop any time soon.
“We are planning on hosting Easter Games for development. It’s a four-day tournament for kids aged 11-17 years,” said Morata.
“We have realised that we don’t have Easter Games for juniors which have multiple sporting codes in Thembisa. My team and I then decided to start planning and inviting teams from all sporting codes which they responded positively to,” added Morata.
She said the story behind hosting the Easter Games is to keep children from the streets during school holidays.
“Also, we want to bring back the culture of playing sports from grassroots level, introduce other sporting codes which they are not familiar with such as indigenous games,” concluded Morata.
