THE Miss Rural Heritage beauty pageant was a platform meant to celebrate cultural diversity as participants were drawn from different parts of the country, the Zimbabwe Multi-talented Youth Association (ZimTaya) chairperson, Christina Matizha, has said.
Matizha told NewsDay yesterday ahead of the provincial finals scheduled for August 13 at Mahusekwa Secondary School that such a platform allowed for the nurturing of young girls’ morals.
“This pageant presents a cultural revolution in Zimbabwe because the models participating are from different provinces, backgrounds thus creating diversity,” she said.
“We also encourage girls to have morals for a better future and that through that way they will continue to inspire each other as peers.”
Matizha said they were now finalising preparations for the pageant and expressed gratitude to the participants’ parents who had thrown their weight behind the pageant.
“The girls are excited because to them this is a new initiative; it is just unfortunate that we have a limited number of participants we enrol. The girl’s parents are also in support of the pageant,” she said.
“The aim of our pageant is to give exposure to the girl-child who is cut off from the modern community through various circumstances. We educate our girls on issues of early child marriages, HIV and Aids, current affairs so that they are well informed because we believe that if we groom them at an early stage, they would be in a better position to understand life,” Matizha said.
This programme is bent to empower the girl-child and providing these girls a new world, self-worth and self-actualisation and to a certain extent have been educated of their rights as children and young women.
ZimTaya is a youth empowerment association that works with youths in the country’s rural outskirts.
-Newsday
