By Patricia Mashiri
SAYWHAT, a youth and student centred organisation which works on sexual reproductive health will on 22 October 2022 hold a Creative Reproductive Health arts for Transformation (CRAFT) festival, a talent show meant to identify and nurture talented young people in music and art.
Leo Munyonho, the SAYWHAT Senior Programs Officer said the COVID-19 made them realize that young people had great talents that were not being utilised hence the decision to come up with the programme.
“Through social media, we observed great talent that was happening among young people and we decided to come up with a talent show that is meant to identify talent from young people across the social divide.
“We came up with new activities. One of the activities is called the CHASE competition. Through the CHASE competition we would go around the provinces identifying young people in different art categories. In this case we were focusing on music, public speaking, poetry and drama,” Munyonho said.
He added that they had preliminary competitions around the country where they selected winners for each category.
“These winners are 36 in total and are the ones which qualified for the CRAFT festival. We subjected the young people to mentorship program where we identified established artists in those specific categories to mentor these young people across the provinces over a period of two months.
“The next stage is promoting their content nation wide. We will help them record and master. We are expecting them to emerge, start recording albums etc. We are going to make sure that their speeches, acts and music are going to be played at a number of radio stations. Already we are having community radio stations playing content provincial winners who could not make it to the nationals as a way of promoting them,” Munyonho said.
The CRAFT festival is a guided competition where the participants are given a theme to do their art around sexual reproductive health and gender Based Violence.
Meanwhile, Aleck Chingwawu, one of the winners in Harare province music category and now a CRAFT contestant said his music was inspired by the continued abuse of the girl child.
“There used to be an elderly man who stayed in our area with his daughters, he would beat them so badly even for issues that would not require that. At one point he uprooted a pole to beat them up, he even attempted to assault his wife, their mother after she confronted him on the matter,” said Chingwawu.
