If this has escaped your attention, allow me to recap.

In terms of population, economies, and culture, Africa is the world’s fastest growing continent.

And speaking of growth, Substack is one of the world’s fastest growing content and community platforms.

So, with these two things being so, this is where The Shifting Sands has chosen to plant its flag – our home for original opinion, inspirational ideas, and clear actions from Africa’s leading luminaries.

The Shifting Sands will serve as a unique space for thinkers and doers from across the continent and beyond to impart their one grand idea or insight that will shape minds and mould futures.

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Why this? Why now?

The issue is alluded to in the name - shifting sands. It recognises that we are living in a time of constant and rapid change and movement. New times require new ideas and new conversations from under-tapped quarters, not least because these changes are already having an impact on how we live, work, learn, and play.

That’s why The Shifting Sands will primarily focus on one big idea per contributor that is related to culture, technology, education, or entertainment. And it’ll get really interesting where these areas intersect.

The challenge is to ignite the minds and consciousness of young people across Africa, her diasporas, and beyond. And to influence policymakers. So, we will inspire, innovate, and elevate to shape environments for the benefit of our continent.

At the same time, there is also a relative lack of African voices on Substack (there are things the Substack can do to remedy this). In the meantime, we are here to help fill that void with intentionality, authenticity, and with quality.

The opportunity is to build, over time, the deepest and most influential library of contemporary African ideas – and then help bring them to life.

Each piece will be authentically crafted by a leading light from the continent, and the collection will be curated right here for you and with you. This is your space to also share ideas, to challenge, to connect, and to find solutions.

Longer-term, the aspiration is for spaces like this to exist in physical form all across the continent.

So what happens next?

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be uploading a few old pieces from the archives to give a little flavour as to what’s to come. But there will be some notable differences that we look forward to sharing with you when we (re)launch in earnest!

We will also be establishing partnerships to amplify our impact and bring additional mutual benefits to respective communities.

And we will be preparing to launch with insightful and exclusive new content that you can only find here.

Three simple ways to get involved

• Subscribe – this is the simplest and easiest action. The button is right there!

• Share – If you come across something you enjoy reading, share it on Substack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, email, or whatever your preferred ping-it-to-people platform is. Wisdom shared is wisdom squared.

• Suggest – This platform belongs to everyone. So who would you like to write the next piece? Tell us – we might just make that wish come true…!

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Thank you for reading and becoming part of this community’s journey.

With warmth,

DKO

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to distil my entire life’s work and life philosophy into one graphic and one phrase.

Having spent my career working in large companies, running my own businesses, and dedicating time to philanthropic, social, and community work, I became Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists in 2010.

It was through this that I earned the right to apply to the College of Arms for my own official coat of arms. As part of the design process, you get to choose a motto that encapsulates your philosophy.

I gave a speech about entrepreneurship in Cape Town earlier this year where I said that there has never been a better time to build a successful business.

However, I’ve always believed that whilst creating wealth through enterprise is good, it’s what you do with the wealth that you create that really matters. My argument is simple: there is nothing wrong with doing well for yourself and making money, but this needs to be balanced by doing good and using that wealth to help others.

Therefore, my wife and I chose as our motto for the coat of arms: ‘Do well. Do good’.

The moral obligation of entrepreneurs

There is an interesting yin and a yang between doing well and doing good, between making money and contributing to helping others.

The point remains that in order to use your wealth for good in the first place, you’ve got to be able to create it to then be in control of how it’s distributed.

I’ve observed that there are three types of people in this world:

1. Those who get their pleasure out of harming others

2. Those who get their pleasure out of helping others

3. And those who get their pleasure out of pleasing themselves with no particular regards to anyone else.

The first I call sadists, the second I call philanthropists, and the third I call introverts. What really matters for the future of society is that the philanthropists outnumber and outwit the sadists.

Without a philanthropic heart, society becomes hopeless, and as such I view it as a moral obligation for entrepreneurs to be philanthropic in their actions.

I’ve made quite a lot of money in technology and communications. And I’ve given quite a lot of it away. I’ve given a lot of my time and expertise away as well, as I chair charities and I’ve been doing charity work for most of my life. If you were to go to my old college in Cambridge which helped me do well by providing me with a great education and life experience, there is a building called the Olisa Library, built using an endowment my wife and I made to the old college. Cambridge had helped me, so I helped them, and the many other people who will come thereafter.

You should do your best with your talents and then you should contribute back. Never fool yourself that your talent is all down to you, or all for your own benefit. It is important not to let your talents or successes get to your head, and that that’s why the ‘Do well. Do good’ motto means a lot to me.

Technology and social change

So what about creating wealth? There are two types of entrepreneur – the person who’s got no choice because there aren’t any jobs and they must make a living, and the person that’s got the visionary zeal to create the next Apple.

Whilst the former are important, I believe that the latter are even more so as it is they who will create employment and wealth for many people. If you want to create something scalable, your product has to have global appeal.

So if you take for example one of the things Africa leads the way in in technology – mobile banking and payments – it’s far ahead of the UK. It could therefore make sense to be entrepreneurial in this space and export products and services to the EU or America.

Technology has the potential to make African products and concepts available to the world in a way that was not possible 30 years ago.

Technology can also bring about cultural and political shifts, and play a big role in furthering democracy and political accountability across Africa. I can give a very good example to demonstrate this from the UK.

One of the most embarrassing things to occur in the context of government and governance was the MP’s expenses scandal, where legislators in the land of the mother of all parliaments were found with their snouts in the public trough.

The numbers were small in terms of pounds but the numbers were large in terms of participants and those who turned a blind eye. It was deeply embarrassing for the UK because the moral high ground with which Britain traditionally carries itself had become seriously undermined.

The British public expressed their discontent at the system, and so the people changed the system – it wasn’t parliament or the political leadership that changed it.

I was one of the five people on the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) that put in place the new expenses system that is designed to ensure that another expenses scandal can’t happen again.

Where technology has aided democracy and accountability here is that anyone anywhere in the world can now log on to the IPSA website and find out how much taxpayers’ money any MP in the UK has spent on any item of expenditure since the last election.

The data had always existed, but it’s the technology that has changed the ease with which the data is accessed, making it available to the people who then go on to choose the leaders of their country.

Diverse leadership in the UK

My father came to the UK from Nigeria on a boat in 1947/48, a lonely student trying to become a lawyer in London.

At the time, he was a rarity.

Today the Powerlist features a cross-sector list of enormously influential people of African and Caribbean heritage in the UK, and there are many more worthy influencers and leaders outside that list of 100. However, while the Powerlist proves that people from diaspora communities can rise to the top, the numbers are still small. Whilst change is happening, it’s not happening fast enough we need to become even more impatient.

It’s OK to be impatient.

The change within two generations of the inventory of potential leaders from diaspora communities in the UK is far greater than it’s ever been, but the reason for the current lack of black people in positions of senior leadership is also an issue of inventory.

If you imagine that you will probably have to be in your fifties or sixties to end up on the board of a major company, there just aren’t very many of us born in the 1950s and 1960s to occupy those positions.

When I was growing up, I was one of the very few black people in Nottingham. Two generations on, this is no longer the case but there is much to be done to ensure that these future leaders can reach the top.

Change will continue to happen, driven by two things – the inventory increasing and the barriers to progress fading away. Increasing the numbers of suitable candidates is achieved by showing the scale of the opportunities available – and here the Powerlist has an important role to play.

Tearing down the barriers to progress is largely a matter of working on the grey matter between the ears of talented members of people from diaspora communities. As my career and those of other Powerlisters have shown, there are in fact, no insurmountable impediments to achieving the highest levels of society in the UK.

But getting there entails doing well– really well – at what you set out to do.

Leaders don’t come second – never mind coming at the bottom of the class!

We also acknowledge our shortcomings and don’t blame others for our failures. By definition, winning means being better than everybody else.

That being said, not only must future leaders be self-motivating, society in general and employers in particular have an obligation to ensure that the rise of talent isn’t impeded by unconscious blockages. And here, future leaders need to display an impatience for change.

In the last government, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skill, Vince Cable, launched a new initiative to encourage more diverse boards, this followed the enormous success of increasing more women at board level.

Previously there weren’t any women on half the boards of FTSE 100 companies – now every board has at least one and that’s happened in the lifetime of one parliament. This is proof that things that once seemed permanent and deeply engrained in decades of culture are capable of changing very quickly.

I repeat, it’s OK – even important – to be impatient, otherwise things won’t change.

The pride and fall of Ozymandias

One of my big lessons from life is that failure to progress is largely personal rather than systemic. People of talent hold themselves back because they think that they are victims rather than believing in their own capabilities and shooting for the stars.

However, there is another side to this lesson – as our mothers told us, pride comes before a fall. Getting too big for one’s boots and believing that success is all down to talent and doesn’t depend on the help of others is equally dangerous.

Hubris – excessive pride and self-confidence – is brilliantly caricatured in Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias.

It speaks of the statue of a great pharaoh commissioned by himself but which now lies in pieces decaying in the desert.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias reminds everyone that no matter how big you think you have become, unless your achievements are substantive and sustainable they will count for nothing.

The best way that I have found of staying grounded is to help others. By working in charities I am constantly reminded both how fortunate I am compared to the lives of so many others but also I am able to return the help that I have received from so many people over the years.

From that inspiring teacher to the stranger at a foreign airport, my life chances have been enhanced by the support of others. I know it and I never forget it – charity work is a way of repaying that generosity to those in greater need.

Which brings me back to my motto.

Never limit your own ambitions. In all things you should aim for the highest levels that your abilities can take you. But, as you build your legacy, remember Ozymandias, whose investment in temporary, self-absorbed, and ostentatious displays came to nought.

Instead, my experience shows that the more you do to help your fellow citizens, the more your fellow citizens will do to help you.

Or, put more simply: ‘Do well. Do good’.

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Sir Ken Olisa OBE is a businessman and philanthropist of Nigerian and British heritage. He founded and led the AIM-listed technology merchant bank Interregnum and now leads Restoration Partners. He is the first Black Lord-Lieutenant of Greater London, and is King Charles III’s representative in Greater London. He is a Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, and has served and serves on several boards of philanthropic, educational, and regulatory organisations — he was the first British-born Black man to serve as a Director of a FTSE-100 company (Reuters). With his wife, Julia, he endowed the Olisa Library at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

Follow Ken on Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X.

The story of success that we dream of in Africa goes something like this:

You escape from the village where you grew up, make it to the big town, and from there leave the country to go to London, or Paris, or New York. You work extra hard, overcome a multitude of challenges and attitudes, and finally make it big over there.

Only once you’ve made it over there can you truly call yourself an African success story.

My question is how can you call that success when you’ve had to leave your home, leave your family, leave your cultures and tradition, and change yourself to fit into someone else’s system just in order for you to ‘make it’?

That is not success.

Success is to stay where you are from and build something that people from London, Paris, or New York will travel half way across the world to be a part of.

Success is where you can proudly invite people into your country, into your culture, and into your way of life, and they are happy to come and fit into the new world that you expose them to.

That is my vision of the African dream.

Make the diaspora dream

For the typical African success story to change, Africans both in African and in the diaspora need to be able to dream of making it in Africa. For young Africans to dream of a future in Africa, we have to better promote the image we want to see of ourselves.

The continent is culturally powerful, and when I talk about culture, I mean contemporary culture. Traditional perceptions of Africa – Moroccan mint teas and all – do not need me to promote them. Tradition will live, but my message is that there is life in contemporary Africa too.

The diaspora should be looking at the continent as a powerful cultural hub and, being abroad, they are in a position to spread the contemporary culture that we are creating across Africa. This is what will make the diaspora dream of Africa again.

Many in the Moroccan diaspora still look at Moroccans in Morocco like they’re the underdeveloped guys. The same possibly applies across Africa’s countries and their respective diasporas.

We have to convince Africans in Africa, and Africans in the diaspora, that things are happening in Africa. We have to believe in it ourselves, before talking to westerners.

It’s harder for us Moroccans than it is for, say, Nigerians to spread our culture across the world. The influence and reach of French speakers is not the same as those with an English-speaking heritage.

My dream is not solely about connecting Africa to the world, it’s primarily about reconnecting Africans with each other.

My dream is to reconnect North Africa with our sub-Saharan brothers and sisters.

I am tired of seeing this separation across the Sahara, economically and culturally. There are those who are from north Africa who don’t accept or embrace the fact that they are African, as if Casablanca play in the UEFA Champions League…

Music is not my goal; it’s my vehicle

When I launched my music career 11 years ago I never wanted to go from Morocco straight to France, nor did I want to turn straight to the Middle East, despite at the time everyone telling me to do so.

Instead, I decided to go to Dakar in Senegal first. At the time, Dakar was one of the biggest urban cultural hotspots in the French-speaking world. I went there with my music, someone heard it, sent my track to DJ Edu at the BBC back in 2005, and this is how my career really kicked off.

More than a decade later, I’m humbled by the fact that people like my music, but music is not my goal, it’s my vehicle.

My goal is simple.

I’m absolutely crazy in love with my country, Morocco. Although we have been Arabised, we are north African. We have cultural and religious similarities with the Middle East, but our daily lives are closer to that of the Senegalese, Mauritanians, Malians or Ghanaians and this is reflected in my music.

When I released my first track, I got an email from George Clinton’s nephew. He told me that he’d heard my music and he could definitely feel the Africa in it… but there was something else, and he couldn’t explain what it was. I said, maybe it’s north Africa.

African + Arabian = Afrobian.

And with that the name for the genre was born.

It was important for me to create a new genre as I’m not going to try to pigeonhole my music into pre-existing genres if it doesn’t fit there. I’m not going to say ‘well, it’s kind of a mix of RnB, jazz, and soul…’ We didn’t create RnB, jazz, or soul. I’m trying to be authentic and aesthetic. Alhamdulillah, people now understand that.

That’s why I’ve created a genre of my own that I can embrace, that Africans can embrace, and that people in the diaspora can embrace and proudly share with their non-African friends. I’m trying to do music that respects who we are, but at the same time, can please anyone’s ears. I want afrobian music to be to Morocco what sushi is to Japan, and what capoeira is to Brazil – other people can try and imitate, but no one can do it quite like someone from that region.

Do it for Africa from Africa

When I win international awards like MTV awards and AFRIMA awards it’s not for me; it’s for young people in my country to see that I’m from Taroudant, from a non-English-speaking country, I sing in my local language, I worked hard, and I made it happen, and I did it being proudly 100% Moroccan and being proudly 100% African.

Most of all, I did it from Morocco.

Not Paris, not London, not New York. Morocco.

If I can make it happen independently, anyone else can do it. You don’t need to dream of leaving to live in Paris. I didn’t do this. For Moroccans, we are made to believe that the only outlet we have to gain international recognition is through Paris.

I hope I have shown that there is another way because I did it by looking south to my brothers across Africa, rather than looking north to Europe.

When I released my album here in Morocco and said that I’m going to Senegal, my guys said ‘you are you crazy. I know the head of Universal Records in Paris. I know one rule about life and that is that you take the easy path.’ I said, no, I’ll take the path that’s right for me, even if it’s the harder path.

The easy road was paved by someone else. I wanted to pave my own road.

I went straight to Senegal, and never looked back.

Instead of saving money to beg for visas to Europe or the USA, why not save and visit your neighbours in Africa?

We have to learn to understand each other more, and be proud of our own cultural specifities, and that involves going out there to meet our African brothers, and also inviting our fellow Africans to visit us in Morocco.

I’ve already had some well-known names in music from Africa and the US come to Morocco to work on projects with me here, in my country and to see my village.

To have people come to visit me from all over the world in my Moroccan paradise is part of my African dream. I don’t want to go to Paris to make my music. Afrobian is from Morocco, so you should come to experience it in its home.

Home is home. My grandparents, my uncles, my cousins, are still living in the village I grew up in. Here in my village, we are human beings. We are not robots like in some of the cities of Europe where you don’t even know or talk to your neighbour, and your life is rules, taxes, and boxes.

Sometimes it’s hard here. Sure. But it’s okay in the end. Here, everybody’s involved.

We have a joke that in Morocco we don’t need the police because, in reality, everybody is a policeman! Here, we don’t feel the need to control everything; some things we just let go, maybe because there is that spirituality from believing in something higher than humans.

This is the difference and this is why, despite being able to move and live anywhere in the world, I chose to stay in Morocco.

Outsiders may say that my continent is messed up, but it’s my home, and from here I will still conquer the world.

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Ahmed Soultan is a Moroccan singer and songwriter, considered one of the leaders of the "Nayda" (new urban Moroccan scene). His ‘afrobian’ style of music embodies cultural universality, blending languages and traditions in his work. Through his music, Soultan bridges linguistic and cultural divides, making him a distinctive voice in Africa’s music scene.

Connect with him on Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, and YouTube.

Not so long ago I would have stressed the importance of African artistes incorporating the English language into their music if they wanted it to break into international markets.

I soon realised the flaw in my logic when I looked at my own taste in music and realised that, as an English and Swahili-speaking Kenyan, I still love kwaito music from South Africa, which is normally performed in Zulu – this despite me having absolutely no idea what was being said!

The lack of comprehension doesn’t stop me from listening to kwaito. (Although not strictly kwaito), how many of you have heard Khona by Mafikizolo?

And now, hand on heart, how many of you (non-Zulu speakers) actually understand what it’s about?

Exactly. And it almost doesn’t matter…

If I wanted to take the extra step of finding out what the lyrics mean, I could always do that online. But the success of such songs illustrates that, even in today’s globalised world, creating an international hit song in Africa doesn’t require you to sing in English.

Good music should make you feel, as well as think. That way, even if you can’t think about what is being said, you can still feel it.

It’s also about making sure that you develop a strong brand – especially online, because that’s where you’re accessible to the whole world – such that, if someone really likes the sound of your song, they will find a way to figure out what you’re talking about, or fans will collaborate to translate.

Music from Africa has a distinctive sound and that’s a good thing. That distinctiveness might come from the language, or the beat, the melodies, or the harmonies.

It is entirely possible for a song to have a European house beat, but if the vocal track is sung in a local African language that is enough to change the sound from euro house to afro house.

We could play around with the language, or even what we sing about and how we translate those concepts through music. Love is a universal theme, but it can be explored through music in its local context.

A song about a boy in a village trying to woo a girl by wooing her parents – something that might only make sense to people who are familiar with that process – is still a love song nonetheless, but it’s telling an African love story.

That said, you wouldn’t want to put a musician in a box and dictate what he or she must sing about. Whilst music is about art, music is also about money. When you consider the commercial side of things, the Kenyan market is such that if your song hits in the club, the radio stations will have to pick it up. This influences the kind of music that artistes make as they want to get as much airplay for their tracks as possible.

So whilst the spread of internet access has impacted how artistes attempt to internationalise, and has enabled audiences to discover and comprehend songs in foreign languages, it has also shifted the fundamental power bases within the music media industry.

Traditionally there was the media, the musicians and the audience. The media brought the musicians to the audience. Digital has disrupted that status quo; audience are no longer tied to what radio or TV plays. People can go online and discover new music from any local, African, or international artist.

Radio may soon lose its crown

The result is that power is shifting away from broadcasters to the artistes and fans, who can now enjoy more direct relationships with each other. Increasingly, we broadcasters find ourselves playing catch-up if the audience has already caught on to a certain song they’ve discovered via the internet and it’s become popular in the clubs. If it’s not on our playlists, we end up having to put it on so as not to seem slow or out of step.

Like many developing countries, Kenya is in the process of its digital migration but despite digital beginning to dictate trends, traditional analogue radio is still going strong. Radio is still the most accessible media throughout the country. If you have a car, you can listen to the radio. If you go to the village, most people have access to a radio, as it’s more affordable than a TV and doesn’t need electricity. If you are not literate, or don’t have access to newspapers and magazines, radio fills that void.

But as more of Africa gets online and gets connected, radio will need to change, and as markets expand, so the music industry in Kenya – and across the continent – will also need to change.

African music is breaking international barriers again (though artistes like Fuse ODG, D’Banj, and K’naan) in a way that it has struggled to since the afrobeat revolution. But to sustain this progress we need to create structures that can make this rise in popularity work for us. It’s all well and good to have the sound, but that’s less than half the story. If you don’t have the music business acumen then you have a problem, if not now then definitely later. It’s only now that artistes are beginning to carry themselves as a brand.

Once artistes start carrying themselves as a brand, they start to realise that their song is not just their song; it’s a commodity that they need to sell.

Kenyan artistes are beginning to understand that there’s a significant business aspect to making music which necessitates good packaging and marketing.

Whilst there’s a need for more business-minded individuals working in the music management side of Kenya’s industry, those who do carve such roles for themselves find only underdeveloped and non-professional structures for them to operate within. We’re even only just beginning to see songwriting develop as a standalone career path in the industry. The structures that support behind-the-scenes roles really need strengthening if we are to truly be able to compete in the global market.

The internet is making the world a smaller place and a larger place, so we must always remember that our competition is not just our fellow Kenyan artiste. My radio station plays all genres of music so your song could air on KISS 100 in between a Chris Brown song and a Kanye West song.

Many artistes misunderstand global competition. To compete internationally doesn’t require you to change the language of your song. However, it does require an understanding that your song can have a meaning, but your music must mean business.

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Adelle Onyango is a Kenyan media personality, mental health advocate, author, podcaster, and social entrepreneur. A former Kiss 100 FM radio host, she uses her platform to champion mental wellness, youth empowerment, and gender equality across Africa. Recognised as one of Africa’s most influential women, Onyango breaks stigma around mental health and advocates for marginalised communities through media and social entrepreneurship.

Connect with Adelle on Instagram, X, and LinkedIn.

Those with fair skin go further. That’s the troublingly powerful message that the entertainment industry transmits.

My industry disproportionately projects and elevates light-skinned women in magazines, films, music and commercials. If there’s a fair girl in it then it’s most likely she’ll be the lead – affluent, attractive, desired, rich and successful.

I am not against light-skinned ladies being centre-stage or in the spotlight. I have personally used fair-skinned dancers and backing singers in my videos and live performances, not because of the shade of their skin, but because they had the right talent for the project.

In an ideal world, opportunity should always come down to how good you are at what you do, not how light your skin is. Yet this ‘fair girls go far’ belief is so deeply engrained in Africa’s entertainment industries that a generation of impressionable young people are being driven to seek brighter futures by lightening their skin.

Fair game

In west Africa’s entertainment hubs the perception is that it is much harder for dark-skinned women to get decent on-screen roles. Whether or not this idea of widespread industrial bias towards the fair is true, it’s the perception that’s almost as damaging as the reality.

Young dark-skinned aspirant actresses have told me that they feel discouraged to the point that they don’t even want to turn up to auditions because they believe they’re automatically at a disadvantage.

To improve their chances of making it in the most image-conscious of industries, many turn to skin lightening – and it’s not just young aspiring actresses.

Older women are doing it too. Even boys are supposedly doing it in Jamaica, as are middle-aged men are targeted in India.

I have never had to directly deal with this bias so far – not to my face at least, although who knows whether I have missed out on other opportunities due ingrain biases baked into someone else’s decision-making process.

Yet if someone were ever to suggest to me that I could, say, conquer the US and win a Grammy if I were to just lighten my skin a little, I would stand my ground and shut them down. Period.

I am fine as I am and, more to the point, I have total faith in my talent.

I would rather reach my career goals through working hard, working smart, and developing my gifts.

The solution is not the solution

I know women who are lightening their skin. What’s just as worrying to me is that it’s become so normalised that it’s not taboo, or even a cause for defensiveness. They’re open about it, almost proudly so.

They tell me they are doing it because they believe that’s how to get further along in life.

Someone should launch a skin lightening product called ‘Miss Sold Dreams’ for all those girls who have bleached and still didn’t get the attention or the success they wanted.

If you are compelled to bleach because you think it will solve a particular problem in your life, there is no guarantee that it will. The problem may still remain, and then what? Being dark skinned is not your problem – it’s a perverse society’s problem. Choosing to whitewash your beautiful skin turns their problem into your problem.

And fashions change. We’re in a world that changes daily. Lean ladies like Claudia Schiffer were in fashion in the 1990s but these days curvier ladies like Beyoncé are what girls aspire to. What if, one day, being fair skinned becomes unfashionable? All these girls who have spent all these years and all this money to become lighter, what will they do with themselves? Bleach themselves back to black?

Corporate manipulation

The companies that make these products profit out of people’s insecurities without regard to the impact that the messaging and the products have on people’s lives, both psychologically and physically.

It’s ridiculous the amount of money spent on skin lightening products [Companies and Markets estimate that, by 2018, the global market will reach nearly $20 billion].

The money that is spent on buying these products would be better invested in developing talents or learning new skills.

Companies would stop producing these products if consumers weren’t buying them. They’re only catering to public demand. So long as there is demand there’ll be someone there willing to meet it.

Of course a woman has every right to decide what she does with her body, but I only ask how far are you prepared to go and at what cost?

Are you also going to change the nose you don’t like, and the ear lobe you don’t like, and maybe the little toe on your left foot that you don’t like? You’re entitled to do what you want with your body, but how much are you willing to change?

We need to learn to derive more confidence from what lies within, that way, when someone tries to convince you to change something about yourself, you have the confidence to let them know that you are comfortable with who you are.

I’m writing this because I feel that we need to give our young women something greater to aspire to… themselves.

They need a new kind of self-confidence that comes not from how long your hair is, or how light your skin is, but a confidence that comes from deep within. A confidence that comes from knowing your potential, that comes from knowing what you’re good at, that comes from knowing that you can be great just by being yourself.

Look at India Arie, Serena Williams, Ama K Abebrese and Lupita Nyong’o. They are successful because they’ve invested time, money, blood, sweat and tears into becoming brilliant at what they do, all whilst maintaining who they are.

As a woman, no matter where you come from, you should have the self-belief that stems from knowing you are strong and special. Everybody has something about them that makes them special. If you find, develop, and use it, there’s no reason why you can’t become great.

But we’re too often blinded by trying to fit society’s model of what ‘special’ is. If 100 girls are all trying to stand out and be special, and to do this 99 girls decide to spend money on lightening their skin whilst the one remaining girl decides to spend time on developing her talents, at the end of the day none of the 99 girls will be special because they all now look like each other, and it’s the one girl who is dark and now even more talented who will stand out as special.

Think about it.

If you come from a poor or disadvantaged part of the world and you are looking for a way – any way – to gain an advantage in life, I know it must be tempting, especially if other people are doing it too.

When my mother gave birth to me at 25 her parents kicked her out. She didn’t go and bleach to create a better future for herself; she went to school.

One of the tracks that means most to me on my forthcoming debut album The Love Genesis (finally out soon!) is called ‘Strong Woman’, a song that pays tribute to the strength and resilience of the female heart.

Life will forever throw challenges at us, but if we call on our inner strength, we can survive and thrive. There are things you can do to make yourself a better person that don’t involve changing the colour of your skin.

I fully back those in the public eye like Ama K Abebrese and Nandita Das who are behind awareness campaigns that give young girls the confidence to know that being fair is not a prerequisite for being successful – it’s all about loving yourself for who you are, and working on improving your opportunities through improving your skills.

It’s a strong but really simple message: decide to be you, and then decide to be great at being you.

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Jane Awindor, better known by her stage name ‘Efya’ is one of the most celebrated voices to emerge from Ghana, a soulful powerhouse and genre-defying pioneer who helped shape the alternative music wave across West Africa. A consistent, award-winning artist with a career marked by versatility and artistic depth, Efya bridges afro-soul, r&b, and highlife into something distinctly her own.

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