Gospel artist with the rural girl at heart

Standard People
BY INDIANA CHIRARA SOME people are born with confidence in whatever they do in life and they succeed in most of their endeavours.

Local gospel artist, Nyaradzo Mashayamombe, recently took a bold move to mix her stage and studio adventures with charity work.She has formed an organisation called Tag Life International, which mainly focuses on boosting confidence in young girls, especially those in the rural areas as they lack exposure to many modern developments.

Mashayamombe was born and bred in the rural areas and did her primary and secondary education at rural schools.

She has experienced every stage of a rural girl’s life.

“When I was growing up, I realised that most girls had low self-esteem.

“Most of them lack self-confidence and at the end they do not achieve their desired goals in life.

“Through our programmes we will be inspiring hope in the young girls as well as confidence building which involves sharing life experiences and how to overcome various challenges.

“I know everything about rural life and I have seen some very intelligent girls being wasted away in the village and have realised that at times it was because of lack of proper guardianship,” she said.

Members of Tag Life International aim at initiating long-running programmes to bridge generation gaps and strive to make them community-based.

“Our aim is to make the programme community-based so that when we launch programmes in different parts of the country, members of any community would be able to oversee and run the projects.

“In the long run we would want to see every rural school running the programme because we believe it will go a long way in the development of the girl child,” she said.

She said the programmes did not only target the girl child as they also involved men at different levels.

“In one of our programmes, we encourage and teach fathers to support their daughters, mothers to give a girl child time to read and as for brothers, we encourage them to respect, their sisters.

“If we leave men out of these programmes we won’t achieve much because they pose the greatest threat to the girl child, especially through incidents that involve abuse and rape,” she said.

Due to financial constraints and lack of resources, the programme has a number of limitations in its outreach to remote rural areas.

Currently the organisation is operating through money raised from the musician’s projects and it has five members.

The organisation is lobbying for a better environment for every child to give them a bright future.