Goitseone Molibi Boikaego, known to everyone as Boikaego, grew up in a family of twelve in Lesenepole Village, a small rural community of around 2,400 people in the Palapye District of Botswana. In Lesenepole, there is not a structured sport infrastructure, and opportunities are limited to football grounds at local schools. What is not scarce, is people. Elders are giving young people a chance.
In the case of Boikaego, it was his primary school teacher who made him assistant coach for a Botswana Women’s Football Division One League team called Ground Warriors Football Club. That trust changed his life.
Sport for me isn’t just games. It’s discipline, healing, and a second chance.
A Career Ended, But A Purpose Was Found
In the past, Boikaego was a runner — 400m and 1500m — as well as a footballer and rugby player. Sport was not just something he did; it was who he was. Then an ankle injury ended his athletic career, and he found himself lost.
What pulled him through wasn’t leaving sport behind. It was finding a different way to stay inside it. Through coaching, refereeing, and community organising, he discovered that his role wasn’t only on the field — it was in making sure others could get there. “Sport saved me through the technical and administrative part,” he says. “Now I use it to make sure others aren’t forgotten.”
That instinct, to look for who is being left behind, would eventually lead him somewhere he hadn’t expected: through the gates of Mahalapye Prison.
The Course That Changed Everything
When Boikaego saw a post on Facebook about the TAFISA Certified Leadership Course in Sport for All being hosted by the Botswana National Olympic Committee, he knew immediately it was his chance. He had the passion and the local experience. What he lacked was the platform, the skills, and the recognition beyond his own community. He asked Mr. Tshepang Igobe Isaacs, Secretary of Women and Sport Botswana in the Francistown region, to write him a support letter. That letter got him in.
The course, facilitated by Ms. Game Mothibi and Ms. Tapiwa Masunga, taught him things he had never had formal access to before – proposal writing, project planning, stakeholder engagement, risk assessment, and safeguarding in correctional settings.
I learned how to turn an idea into action.
The course culminated in a real-world implementation of a Sport for All initiative. Boikaego and his team chose to bring sport into a place most people wouldn’t think to look: the Female Wing of Mahalapye Prison. As Group Coordinator for the Graceland Team, a group of seven that eventually became four, Boikaego led from the front. When others dropped off after Level 1, the remaining members held together and kept going. They divided responsibilities, supported each other remotely and on-site, and Boikaego made multiple trips from Francistown to Mahalapye to negotiate directly with prison officials.
Beyond the Bars
On 12 June 2026, Boikaego stood as Master of Ceremony at the launch of the Sport for Rehabilitation and Reintegration Project at Mahalapye Prison’s Female Wing. Sixty-two people took part (39 female inmates, 1 child, 12 officers, and 10 volunteers) in activities including football, netball, chess, morabaraba, and diketo. The national daily newspaper and television covered the event. Before the launch, a reporter from the Sunday Standard Daily News asked him: “What made you think of prisoners?” In that moment, he understood the weight of what they had built. “This wasn’t just my project anymore,” he says. “People were watching, and it mattered.“
One inmate’s words have stayed with him since: “Beyond the bars, we discovered joy, teamwork, and hope again.“
When the World Took Notice
The impact went further than anyone anticipated: people who had never heard his name before, now knew who he was, and the government took notice. Boikaego is now in conversation with the Vice Chairperson of the Office of the Reintegration of Offenders under the Ministry of Justice and Correctional Services, with a view to scaling the programme to rehabilitation centres and communities across Botswana.
“I went from not being recognised,” he says, “to having government ask to scale our work.”
Start Small. Show Up.
Boikaego’s dream is to register Sport for Rehabilitation and Reintegration as a formal association and build it into an annual Sport for All Festival. But the vision behind it is simpler and older than any of that — rooted in what he learned growing up in Lesenepole, where elders made space for the young, and where people showed up for each other without being asked.
If I, from Lesenepole, can sit with BNOC and prison officials to change lives, so can you. Start small. Show up.
He wants every inmate to feel, in his words, “free and connected again.” For Boikaego, that is what sport is for — not performance, not competition, but something more fundamental. “Sport reminds us we are still human beings, capable of growth and change. That’s what this meant to me.”
SUCCEED Series: Stories of Impact
This story is featured as part of SUCCEED Stories, through the SUCCEED Framework. SUCCEED (Supporting Communities Empowerment & Development through Sport for All) is a global framework dedicated to fostering community empowerment and development through capacity building in Sport for All. Led by TAFISA in collaboration with the IOC through its Olympism365 strategy, SUCCEED aims to provide a unified and synergistic approach towards building the capacity of Sport for All stakeholders.