Dennis King Glah
The launch of the maiden edition of the annual Miss Metropolitan Intellectual beauty pageant will take place in Accra in July, organizers have announced.
The pageant, which is being organized by Miss Metro Foundation, is aimed at crowning a beauty queen, who will become a campaign ambassador for sanitation.
The launch of the pageant will be graced by a number of personalities including the Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture, Mrs. Barbara Oteng-Gyasi, and the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), Mr Akwasi Agyemang.
The pageant will be an advocate for the promotion of good sanitation practices among citizens, as well as undertake an educational campaign project against environmental degradation.
Formerly, Miss Metro Ghana, the winner of the beauty pageant, is expected to use her platform to launch a campaign to advocate for clean water and sanitation.
The campaign is focused on promoting behaviour change in communities and aims to engage youth and stakeholders to become ambassadors for water and sanitation issues.
The Executive Director of Miss Metro Foundation, Mr. Dennis King Glah, revealed that the audition was expected to attract beautiful and intelligent young Ghanaian women between the ages of 18 and 30 from the country’s tertiary institutions.
He said the intellectual pageant, starting July 2020, would see activities from auditions leading to the grand finale virtually and digitally managed, as contestants would engage in innovative social and traditional media intellectual battles for the crown.
With a national crown (Queen of Queens) and six other crowns (Metro Queens)—Tamale, Kumasi, Sekondi Takoradi, Cape Coast, Accra and Tema metropolises—up for grabs, the pageant promises lots of innovative Covid-19 public awareness and sensitization drives coupled with great entertainment.
He used the opportunity to thank all past contestants of Miss Metro Ghana for their selfless contributions, and sponsors such as Jekora ventures, Melcom, Vienna City and Voltic; and also called for support for this year’s event, stating that the Ghanaian woman has a major role to play in curbing the spread of the Covid-19.
Mr. Glah lamented how this nation-building initiative had, so far, struggled to receive the needed support, leading to a regrettably earlier decision to cancel the 2020 edition of the pageant, but says the emergence of Covid-19 as a sanitation-related pandemic in Ghana, sounded a civic call to re-launch the 2020 edition of the pageant.
The pageant, which is in line with the government’s vision to achieve clean water and best sanitation practices, is yet to receive support from the government as well as some of the district assemblies.
By George Clifford Owusu