By Chilungamo Missi

Blantyre, August 31, Mana: Malawi Sounds Enterprise, a body which conducts MASO awards has disclosed that this year’s awards edition aim to promote youth empowerment in the country through arts.

The wards which will open for nominations on September 10, 2022 were first established in 2019 as online awards to promote upcoming artists and other sidelined genres targeting both secular and gospel artists.

In an interview on Wednesday in Blantyre, Director of MASO Awards, Augustine Mukusi said this year’s awards would be conducted under the theme ‘Youth Empowerment through Arts’.

“One of the main agendas of our country is to create employment for the youth, and we thought of contributing to this agenda by coming up with awards which targets everyone in the creative sector.

“Right now creative artists are not being appreciated, we believe that through the platform of MASO Awards we will be able to bring this to light and solicit solutions on how youths can be empowered through arts,” he said.

Mukusi added that this year’s edition would be unique from previous ones in a way that they would attract international artists and introduce more categories which would be announced in due course.

He said that, “We have partnered Amaryllis Hotel, we are going to have pre awards event on October 15 and an after-party event, all which we did not do during the previous awards.”

The Director said that currently the awards have 14 categories and six more are yet to be announced adding that they are trying to not focus on musicians only but everyone in the arts industry.

Nominations for the awards will start from October 10to 14, 2022 and the Pre MASO-Awards, dubbed MASO Acoustic Night is slated for October 15, 2022 while voting starts from October 15 until November 19, 2022.

The Award ceremony is scheduled for November 26, 2022.

This will be the second physical MASO awards ceremony from the 2021 ceremony since they were introduced and conducted virtually in 2019 and 2020.

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