New pageant to empower youths

A LOCAL youth-led organisation, The Zimbabwe Queen, has launched a new pageantry Mr and Miss Supranational Zimbabwe in an effort to empower young people through pageantry.

Zimbabwe Queen director Farai Zembeni told NewsDay Life & Style that their aim was to equip young people with leadership skills and empower them through different projects.

“Our new pageant (Miss and Mr Supranational Zimbabwe) is part of the Supranational franchise which is the third pageant in the world. We believe that through the pageantry that encompasses a variety of workshops, youths will acquire social, economic and leadership skills to prepare them for the real world,” he said.

“Through the pageant, I believe I can create a bridge so that the giants ahead of me and the young queens and kings can create better legacies together. The pageant winners will have the opportunity to represent the country in Poland.”

Zembeni said people had been sceptical about pageantry as they believed modelling was focused mainly on fashion and beauty.

“We are redefining pageantry. Miss and Mr Supranational Zimbabwe is meant to empower young people and instil confidence in them such that when they go into the world, they conquer in all spheres of their lives,” he said. “The target is to move away from the belief that pageantry is all about fashion and beauty. The goal is to make people see how pageantry is empowering so that at the end they will embrace it.” Zembeni said some of the programmes they would undertake included leadership workshops, mental health workshops sponsored by different institutions such as the Zimbabwe Youth Development Fund. He said they would also be doing workshops on mushroom farming, fish farming and other projects that they believe would be sustainable even after the crowning of the queen and the king.