Miss Tourism Kenya contest set to be extended to counties

By Macharia Kamau

Kenya: A beauty pageant started about a decade ago to promote tourism locally as well as abroad is set to be reinvigorated through the counties.

The county editions of Miss Tourism Kenya will be held over the next four months and winners will proceed to contest the national title later this year.

The process of recruiting 47 county organisers who will be the franchise holders and responsible for the pageants in their respective units has already started.

The move to tap into the counties is expected to resuscitate the once popular pageant that has waned over time.

Alice Kamunge, national executive director Miss Tourism Kenya Secretariat, said one must be from that county and they must be able to get the residents and county government to buy into the idea.

“This is something that one cannot do if they do not get a buy-in from the county,” she said.

 Kamunge explained that the franchise holder would be responsible for the franchise in a particular county.

“They have the responsibility to sell to the counties, look for sponsors, models and judges – who must all be residents of the county,” she added.

She said they would be issued with a guideline to ensure a degree of uniformity in how the pageants are organised and the selection criteria.

She added that the beauty pageants that will culminate into a national one in late November will be one of the platforms that county governments can use to showcase what their regions have to offer both tourists and investors looking for opportunities across the country.

Concrete ideas

“It is among the first concrete ideas that the counties have away from the politics and it will be something that can easily showcase what a county has to offer,” she said.

Kamunge said the models would have to be educated, adding that it would not just an issue of beauty.

“If you want to get the message out about what county stands for, the models have to be intelligent and they will be competing against other equally intelligent people at the national level,” she stated.

Kamunge said the Kenyan Secretariat would want to build on the gains made locally to Miss Tourism by making it a regional affair and eventually continental.

This, she said, would be done with the aim of attracting visitors to Kenya as well as promoting intra-Africa travel.

“In future we would want to bring on board other countries in the region. We will be reaching out to other African countries and hopefully we can do a Miss Tourism Africa,” she added.

Kamunge said the aim for such a pageant would be to promote intra-Africa tourism.

She noted that just as trade within the continent is important, so is travel and this can broaden markets for tourists.

“Africans travelling through Africa can also help cushion tourism in times when other markets are not doing so well and tourism industries in Africa suffer,” she said.