PinkTober Shines at Championship

PORT MORESBY (Papua New Guinea) – The Basketball Federation of Papua New Guinea partnered with PNG Cancer Foundation to raise awareness of breast cancer through the PinkTober initiative during the FIBA Oceania U17 Championship.

Basketball Federation of Papua New Guinea (BFPNG) President, Emma Waiwai, said as hosts of the Championship, they had the perfect platform to leverage support and awareness for an important cause.

"One of the programs that we run in basketball is 'Basketball for Good' and we're trying to increase our social messaging by using basketball as a tool to deliver those messages," Waiwai said.

"When we realised that we were playing the games in October, we knew it was in line with the Pinktober campaign.  We thought, this is an opportunity to raise the profile, raise the awareness of Pinktober, what it's all about, so that we get our children to understand the issues around breast cancer."

Waiwai said this would be important for the juniors currently competing at this championship to be able to spread the message. 

"That's the reason why we decided to have pink celebrated everywhere, you can see our officials in pink, you'll see pink on our logo and everywhere we're trying to show pink because we want to support Pinktober as a message and basketball can deliver that," she added. 

FIBA - Jamie Haro