ACTA members yesterday agreed to deliver a development plan for African clubs in time for next year’s Spring Meeting/Mobility Conference in Helsinki, Finland.

“We have decided to come up with a development plan to help clubs in the future for the purpose of funding and growth,” said ACTA President,

John Mutenda. “Our clubs are saying that they are too small, so we have agreed to prepare this development plan, which will encompass all of the ideas of the clubs.

“The FIA has agreed to give us a consultant to move within the clubs in order to see how they can help us in the future,” he added. “We have targeted next year’s Mobility Conference in Helsinki to have the plan finalised and we will go from there. As yet there isn’t a time scale for the development programme.

ACTA members to formulate club development plan ahead of 2016 Mobility Conference “Once we finalise the plan then we can talk about the period involved, whether that’s up to 2025 or 2030.”

Mr Mutenda, who is President of the AA Uganda, said that many clubs in the area face infrastructural challenges and that with no clear, funded development path in place this problem would persist.

“The big issue is infrastructural”, he admitted. “We don’t have enough equipment; we don’t train our staff fully; we don’t have professional enough staff. We need to train our people so that we reach a level of professionalism comparable to other clubs around the world”.

“The clubs need to grow, but you cannot grow when you don’t have funds and you cannot have funds when you don’t have a plan,” he added. “The eventual target is for the clubs to grow sufficiently so that we become a region of our own.”