SINCE popping up on the continental football scene, the African Nations Championship (CHAN) Finals have steadily grown in stature, which has been greatly encouraging to see.

This year, the CHAN football championship is set to take center-stage here in East Africa as the competition will be jointly hosted by Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.

With regard to the CHAN competition, there were glad tidings to report lately about the prize money that will be up for grabs in the hugely anticipated football spectacle.

Indeed, in what was a heartening move, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) announced recently that it had upped the prize money on offer in the CHAN Finals by an astonishingly large 75 percent.

It seems starkly clear then that the whopping 75 percent increase in prize money will doubtlessly act as a great incentive for the assemblage of competing teams in the tourney.

Ergo, it is expected that this year’s CHAN Finals will turn out to be a scintillating and pulsating affair, which could be indelibly etched on all of our minds.

Naturally, it is a truism that as one of the CHAN’s co-hosts this year, our home fans will be offering all of their support to the Taifa Stars, who will be on an enormous quest to leave their mark on the perennially action-packed football event.

Still on football, recent media reports have it that the Ivorian right-winger Amad Diallo has penned a new contract at Manchester United, which will keep him at Old Trafford until 2030.

The 22-year-old marvellous attacker, who joined Manchester United from Atalanta in 2021, has been in top notch form this season as he and his fellow Red Devils continue to take a stab at dramatically changing their season, which has been worryingly heading south so far.

As he continues to gain a stronger foothold in the English Premier League (EPL), it is hoped that Amad, as he is famously known, will keep on going from strength to strength right up to the pinnacle of the sport.

Let us now switch our focus to the home front where one of Tanzania’s pre-eminent female golfers, Madina Iddi, has lamented about a lack of sponsorship, which has been a ginormous challenge facing local women’s golf for quite some time now.

Indeed, this familiar complaint made by top lady golfers is a crying shame as they have clinched some of the continent’s most invaluable golf competitions over the last several years.

For instance, last year the afore-mentioned Madina fantastically claimed the Zambian Ladies Open and the Ugandan Ladies Open to boot.

It should be noted here that in sharp contrast to football, domestic women’s golf has unfortunately received an infinitesimal amount of funds for quite a long spell.

Thus, one would like to call upon would-be sponsors and golf stakeholders to try their damnedest to channel more funds into domestic women’s golf for the betterment of the sport.

And, as Madina so amply demonstrated last year, such financial investment is likely to pay off in a rewarding way.