Its not everyday that you
get a chance to impact positively on a global scale!
When we set out to form African Chess Lounge, we had a
vision of making Chess in Africa an everyday sport where the welfare of the
players was guaranteed and people could make a living through
playing chess the same way they do in other sports like soccer, golf,
athletics, cricket ad infinitum.
The more we travel this road the more we see it as a
reality. If anyone says otherwise, they have no best interest for the
sport, or alternatively they benefit from the sport living in the
shadows. We don't want that.
The
Movement
Our
approach has been 4 pronged, from online chess, chess equipment and supply,
chess training and a chess awareness campaign ranging from chess on
Tv, broadcasting live tournaments and a chess blog http://africanchesslounge.blogspot.com/ .
We have taken the
African continent as our playground and are making giant steps in our
stated vision. One thing however has become obvious, to really do this, we
need the whole African chess community to speak as one voice and this way
we can implement some actual reforms which will be of benefit to people.
To give you an idea. Other sports like soccer for instance
are run by FIFA, an equivalent to FIDE, which in turn works through CAF (
a Continental body) something we don't have for chess, which in
turn works with country federations like SAFA (South African Football
Association) or ZIFA (Zimbabwe Football association) equivalent to our
chess federations like BFA ( Botswana Chess Federation), Malawi Chess
Federation and so on.
Now you can appreciate the efficiency of such
an organization, when it comes to implementing goals and supporting
local federations in their initiative. If we had such a body for instance
in chess and its only goal lets say for arguments sake was to organize 10
Fide rated tournaments per year which is a fairly easy task. Now being
modest lets say we got 5 international Masters from
this exercise you can imagine the rate of progress we would make
in terms of opportunities for the players.
Not to write a manifesto but, lets say pursuing the same
line of thought, this body was responsible for funding the tournaments with
the support and back up of FIDE, you can see how easy it would be to get a
company thats continental like FNB (First National Bank), BP (Fuel
Company), Total, Castle and so on. With the help of local federations its
easy to see how this could easily produce results.
Having said that, at the end of the day having a bright idea
alone has never been the cause of success. It needs to be implemented. Now
to do this we propose to get all chess players to speak as one voice here
on African Chess Lounge. We want to get support of 10 000 chess fans, and
as one voice do a petition to FIDE to formally put
an organization of this nature in place.
We currently are around a fan group of 400-500 on Facebook.
We want to push this to 10 000. We want to do this by 10 July so that we
put it forward to FIDE! We have very capable people in Africa who can head
this group and I believe this is a way forward.
What can I do?
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