The organisation staged meetings in Lilongwe, the country’s capital, and Mzuzu which involved 200 athletes, coaches, team managers and head of institutes to raise greater awareness of the policy.

Henry Sakala, the treasure for the MOC,  said the new policy is approved globally with some parts drawn up by the International Olympic Committee and it has been customised to suit Malawian culture.

"As MOC, we thought of coming up with this policy and want to sensitise athletes in the presence of officials and other interested parties since in most cases athletes are abused by their own coaches, officials or fellow athletes," he commented at the Kamuzu Institute for Sports.

He continued: "We are focusing on safe sport, privacy to protect athletes from abuse, harm and degrading treatment.

"We have cases in this country where athletes are abused sexually as favours to include them in the squad and also insulting female players or athletes that the look like men.

"Sometimes athletes, especially young ones are touched in appropriate places during training by coaches.

"We want to stop such abuses through this policy."

Takondwa Chayang’anamuno, who represented Malawi's Central Region Basketball League in the training, added: "It is good to learn on how we can conduct ourselves because we might get in trouble when traveling to other countries not knowing that our actions might be interpreted as abuse."