Ghana miss out at IAAF World Youth Championships

Ghana will not have any representative at this year's IAAF World Youth Championships which begins on July 10 in Donetsk, Ukraine.

The Ghana Athletics Association had earlier planned for 16-year-old sprinter Susanna Acolatse to represent the country in the 100 meters event, but due to the inability of her parents to raise enough funds to travel with their child, the teenage sprinter couldn’t make the championship.

"We approached her parents to allow her compete for Ghana because her prospects is very high, at the age of 16 she is doing 11.8 seconds which is almost the time our senior athletes are doing here in Ghana," said Bawa Fuseini, spokesperson of the Ghana Athletics Association.

"So with conversations between the parents and the Federation she agreed to run for Ghana and we even went ahead to register her for this year's event which her participation was confirmed but two days after her confirmation the father came back to us that he did not budget for that trip which was going to cost them almost 3,000 dollars.

"So he could not buy ticket to go and the girl also been a minor cannot travel alone and that is where we had challenges," he said.

This is the second successive time Ghana will not be present at the IAAF Junior championship after missing out at last year’s event in Barcelona, Spain.