After Miss World, Lamisi is planning to extend her charity campaign to other African countries
After Miss World, Lamisi is planning to extend her charity campaign to other African countries
Miss Ghana 2005 (and winner of the Miss World ‘beauty with a purpose prize), Lamisi Mbillah is working on extending her social education and charity campaign to some African countries.
In an exclusive interview with JIVE, Lamisi said she is planning to work with other beauty queens to increase awareness about guinea worm and salt iodisation.
She declined to talk about her problems with Sparrow Productions but she says that even though the people who crowned her Miss Ghana abandoned her, she got enormous support from several companies and well-wishers. “It was actually a major struggle. I was going for Ghana and that was what kept me going. I didn’t want the situation where I’ll just give up and Ghana is not represented.” With contentment written all over her face, she went on and on recounting her most cherished moment at the Miss World Pageant in Poland. For Lamisi, her ‘beauty with a purpose’ prize was the most important at the pageant.
Lamisi is very grateful to those who stood behind her, especially, Creative Storm, the organization that shot and edited the five-minute documentary that won her the ‘beauty with a purpose’ prize. “I’m thankful to ordinary Ghanaians who supported me”, she says. “I cannot even count those who supported me and believed in me. It was by no means easy getting to the Miss World. I was very fortunate to have Creative Storm stand behind me all the way from the beginning, helping me with my preparation and everything. As for Sparrow Productions, I put that behind me. That was in the past and I would rather not dwell on that issue.”
As she basks in the glory, Lamisi says her main focus is to intensify the campaign already started in Ghana and help other beauty queens on the continent get their campaigns off the ground. She says after the Miss World pageant, some of the beauty queens from Africa expressed interest in working with her on their local campaigns.
“We [the African beauty queens] came together after that night and said look, we have proven that from Africa we have substance, we are intelligent and one of our own has won this award so we need to use it to show people that Miss World is not just about skin but actually brains as well,” Lamisi says. Soon Lamisi will be traveling to Liberia and Ethiopia where she will be liaising with their reps to work with the youth and street children. She will also be traveling to South Africa to help in a campaign against HIV/AIDS, work with children in Tanzania and help address the problem of youth unemployment in Zambia.
“We are in the process of discussing ways and means in which we can link up and give back to our societies in a much bigger way. We want to make this an African project and not just a Ghanaian thing. In as much as this award is for Ghana, it’s also for Africa, because on that day, Africa shone. We’ve realized that we need to mobilize ourselves and make this big.” Aside these projects, several individuals and corporate bodies have expressed interest in working with Lamisi on various projects.
As a result, she is in no hurry to continue with her studies for a Master’s degree in Public Health. She believes there’s time and place for everything and for now she intends focusing on her charity projects.
