Creating opportunity for young people through sport, and strengthening the sporting friendship between The Bahamas and the United Kingdom.

A few years ago I asked Nick Maughan to build a national boxing academy for our young people. He over delivered. Young Bahamians now have a place where they can discover what they are capable of, with homework rooms, a computer centre, mentoring, world-class coaching and the finest sports facilities in the Caribbean region, including residential accommodation so that it serves the whole of The Bahamas, not just Nassau.

When the British High Commissioner approached me about The Bahamas-UK Sports Academy, I welcomed it at once, for the opportunities it will open for our youth and for the strengthening of the Commonwealth and bilateral ties between the United Kingdom and The Bahamas. Sport has the power to bring nations together in the way that matters most. It connects communities and it binds people.

The Academy was founded by Nick Maughan and built in partnership with the British High Commission, the Governor General and my Government. It carries the Boxing Academy's spirit further, deepening the sporting friendship between our two countries and opening real opportunities for young Bahamians. My Government will work alongside it in the years ahead, and it has my full support.

The British High Commission is proud to be a founding strategic partner of The Bahamas-UK Sports Academy, an independent Bahamian academy based on our shared sporting heritage. Our ambition is to create opportunities for young people, coaches and sporting institutions from both our countries to learn, train and work together. By connecting sport with education, skills and careers, the Academy will create lasting pathways for the next generation and strengthen the sporting bridge between The Bahamas and The United Kingdom.

I have spent my life in Bahamian sport, as an athlete, a coach and now as Cabinet Minister, and I know the moment a young person's talent meets its chance.

Too often that chance has depended on which island you were born on.

The Bahamas-UK Sports Academy helps us to change that, backing the programmes, the coaches and the partnerships that turn talent into opportunity across our whole country.

It will bring young Bahamians and young Britons together, send our coaches to the United Kingdom for training and bring British coaches here, so that both nations develop the athletes and sports leaders of the future.

My Ministry has begun working with the Academy, and it is structured to be a permanent part of how Bahamian sport develops its young people.

Sport does something for a young person that nothing else I know of can do. It gives them a place to go, an adult who expects something of them, and a reason to turn up on a day when nothing else would get them out of the door. I have watched it happen all my life, in the UK and in The Bahamas, and I have never found anything that does it better.

This Academy exists to put that to work for the young people of both our countries, and to strengthen the bond between two nations that share a Crown, a history and a future. It will measure what it does and publish what it finds, whether or not the findings flatter it. It should be judged on that record and on nothing else.

I am proud to have founded it and am grateful to the Governor General, the Prime Minister, the UK High Commissioner to the Bahamas and the Bahamian High Commissioner to the UK. They have each provided me with wisdom, encouragement and support. I am confident that together we have built something that will sustain for the decades to come. Young people deserve institutions built to that standard. We’ve worked hard to ensure that this one is.