Muvi TV, which is hosting the Ready for Marriage show, has given 18 sex workers a chance to win cash prize of about $9,000 and have their wedding paid for. The station said it wanted to give sex workers a second chance in life.

The station spokesperson Corrina Paolini said they want to make a difference to women's lives and these are people, after all.

A local preacher, Reverend Jeff Musonda, gave his qualified support to the sex workers' participation.

"If those people have transformed and stopped their acts, I find no problem. But if it's just for wooing viewership, I would have reservations," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

Muvi TV said it had recruited the women from the streets in different parts of the country.

Some contestants said they sold their bodies because they were single mothers who could not afford to look after their children.

Muvi TV said all contestants who were voted out by viewers would receive consolation prizes of between $1,000 and $1,500.

They would also be offered full-time jobs so that they did not return to prostitution, it said.

The reaction of viewers in the capital, Lusaka, has been mixed.

"Once a prostitute, always a prostitute. It is very difficult for them to just change overnight," one viewer, Humphrey Banda, said.

However, another, Prisca Chisenga, expressed a contrary view.

"It is not fair to judge them by their past," she said.

When reality television was first introduced in Zambia more than five years ago, there was outrage from clergymen who said it would corrupt moral values.

By BBC