Northern Nigeria number one skincare therapist and one of the most successful in the country, Maryam Ali Adamu, Chief Executive Officer of Aljism Skincare Products and wife of Yusuf Gidado Idris, son of former Secretary to Government of the Federation during the General Sani Abacha regime has revealed her passion in life. In a recent interview with Potpourri she said her mission in life is to make women both beautiful and powerful.

On making women attractive, she said, “I believe no woman is unattractive as long as she has flawless skin. The skin is the largest organ in the body hence what a person consumes is equally as important as what they apply on their skin. I used to be troubled by skin problems like acne, spots, discolouration and sunburn. I decided to study skincare after my Masters in Law in England in order to find a solution to my own skin problems. Shortly after my two and a half years programme, I was able to start my own skincare line, using everything I learnt and it has been success story so far.”

When she came back to Nigeria after her programme in England, family and friends encouraged her to help other people by producing and selling skincare products to make others equally flawless. She started producing and selling skincare products in November 2017. She has helped thousands of men and women clear their skin problems.

Today, she is the most successful skincare therapist in Northern Nigeria. Her brand, Aljism Skincare has become a household name. You can hardly bump into 10 northern women without at least 8 knowing Aljism Skincare Products and its CEO, Maryam Ali Adamu.

On making women powerful, the Yobe State-born entrepreneur believes women must shed the toga of merely being comfortable as housewives, sisters or daughters and take their stand among men to control their destinies.

According to Maryam, the best way women can rise above mediocrity and pity is to support one another.

“Women have always been thought to compete with one another but I encourage the opposite. I believe collectively, women have a better and stronger impact in society. Due to the scarcity of women in business in the northern parts of Nigeria, the reality is raising one another up and encouraging and patronizing one another, is the greatest way to balance the equation.

“Women’s table has more strength when balanced by one another. Competing doesn’t allow growth rather it creates segregation. The stereotype of women not supporting women needs to be reversed. Women who support other women are more successful in business. Breaking the stereotype of women only serving as baby-making machines must become a thing of history,” she said.

Maryam Ali Adamu is a graduate of Business Administration and Law from the Coventry University, England. She’s from Yobe State. She is the daughter of Dr Ali Adamu (PhD) Standford and former Executive Secretary of the National Primary Education Commission during the General Sani Abacha regime and presently a business mogul into Oil and Gas.

Source: Vanguard

The highest top paid female athletes according come from Tennis players to Forbes. And Japanese Naomi Osaka has made about $37million from the past year.

Sharapova and Serena Williams were the top earners of the decade before Osaka came on the scene. The three are now the only women to rank among the 100 top earners in sports since 2012.

The 22 year old, has earned $37.4 million over the past 12 months from prize money and endorsements. That’s $1.4 million more than Williams has earned in the same period. The previous record was $29.7 million back in 2015 by Maria Sharapova.

The money Osaka has earned has put an end to Williams 4 year streak as the world’s highest-paid female athlete.

“I’m really interested in seeing a young business grow and adding value to that process,” Osaka told Forbes last year. “I tasked my team with finding brands that align with my personality and my interests.”

Tennis superstars Sharapova, Li Na, Williams and now Osaka are the only women to rank among the 100 top earners in sports since 2012. Every year since Forbes started tracking data, the highest-paid female athlete every year has been a tennis player, with Steffi Graf and Martina Hingis the top earners for most of the 1990s.

Osaka spoke to Forbes about her most recent marketing campaign with Bodyarmor that was just launched last week, “I always look outside tennis to see how other athletes are training and conducting themselves,” she says. “It’s no secret that some of the athletes that I have looked to in shaping my career are non-tennis players. I’m a big basketball fan, and what James Harden has done in the NBA over the last few years has been amazing. He’s definitely one of the most exciting players in the league, so being a part of this spot with him was really fun. I was also lucky enough to shoot this campaign on the same day as Skylar [before the pandemic], so we got to spend some quality time together. She is really down-to-earth, and we got along great.”

L-R, Adegoke Olubisi (CEO), Tito Ovia (Head, Public Growth Sector), Dimeji Sofowora (CFO), image credit: Forbes

Tito, like her cofounders – Goke Olubusi and Dimeji Sofowora – realised the need to improve healthcare systems in Africa, using technology and decided to establish Helium Health.

African hospitals have been operating  manually, from taking notes on paper about patients, all of which has resulted in a major lack in efficiency and accuracy, Sometimes the record are not properly taken or well stored which can result to loss.

This prompted the young Nigerian entrepreneurs Adegoke Olubusi, Tito Ovia, and Dimeji Sofowora to launch Helium Health, a healthcare technology provider working in several African countries.

The young trios are 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees, who recently secured a $10 million investment from a series of funding.

Impressively, Helium Health is already  used by 5,000 doctors, with data from 500,000 patients across West Africa and currently attends to over 145,000 visits from the region.

Tito and her co-founders have said their goal, with Helium Health, is to drive a technological revolution in African healthcare, not just in the medical records space, but every part of the industry.

At the beginning, they had to secure the trust. “You are twenty-something-year-old kids, you are not doctors, and you tell them you want to run their hospital,” said Olubusi.

Olubusi, who serves as the company’s CEO, added. “When we think about the extent of the challenges and problems that we can solve in the healthcare sector in Africa, there could be a million ways in which this can help us grow.”

“This new round means that we have more firepower to be able to expand the reach of our product way beyond Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia where we are now,”

“Imagine if a hospital sees a 1000 people a day,” Olubusi says. “How do you count a 1000 people every day with specific issues they need taken care of when you’re doing everything on paper?”

“The demand is incredible, we’ve had over 250 hospitals sign up,” Olubusi says. “More than half of them have never worked with us before.”

Olubusi, a Johns Hopkins graduate and  with his high school friend Dimeji Sofowora (CFO), and Tito Ovia (Head of Growth), whom he’s known since college. The three of them had studied abroad, had returned to Nigeria and were looking for a problem to solve. They decided to focus on healthcare because it was a sector that desperately needed modernization.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, if you get in an accident and there isn’t a strong emergency department, you will die,” Olubusi says. “Because of the COVID-19 situation, now these countries are having to face the harsh reality of not investing in their healthcare sector.”

We  love this.

Cynthia Kudji, and her daughter, Jasmine have just graduated from medical school at the same time.

Dr.  Kudji, who’s originally from Ghana, West Africa is a single mom. She put her dreams of becoming a doctor on hold when she was pregnant with her daughter at just 23-years-old, then went on to become a nurse and worked as an RN and Nurse Practitioner for almost a decade before deciding to attend medical school.

Both are now graduates of the University of Medicine and Health Sciences (UMHS) St. Kitts and Maine and Louisiana State University (LSU), respectively, with medical degrees in Family Medicine for Cynthia and General Surgery for Jasmine.

In an interview with The UMHS Endeavor, Dr Kudjie explained that she initially had no plans to enter the medical field due to a lack of representation in the field.

“I remember when we were young there were TV shows like The Cosby Show and A Different World,” she said to UMHS. “Seeing African Americans in college or being successful was like firsts. So, for me, it wasn’t like ‘Oh, yes, I want to be a physician’. It was more like, ‘Oh, no, can I really do this? Or, ‘Am I smart enough to do it?”

Dr Kydjie and her daughter definitely had challenges as nontraditional students with Jasmine having to adjust to being so far from her mother.

“I think initially it was difficult because my mom and I have always been really close so I had to get used to the distance, we had to learn how to FaceTime and Skype each other, so we were Skyping each other every day and whenever I had struggles and she had struggles, we just had to learn to communicate from a distance,” the younger Dr. Kudji said. “But I think over time we figured it out.”

They both credit the support of close family and friends in addition to faculty members.

“I always tell people we laugh together, we study together, we cry together,” said Jasmine. “I think medical school is one of those experiences that you don’t truly understand until you’re in it. Sometimes people struggle to find someone who relates to their struggles, so for that person to be my mom was extremely helpful.”

In the 1950s, Helen Williams made history in the United States when she became the first dark-skinned African-American fashion model to cross over into mainstream advertising.

Yet, it was the French who accepted her instead of the Americans who considered her to be “too dark.”

Williams would surmount the challenges that came with the color of her skin, rising to fame in Paris and New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s and paving way for other dark-skinned models.

Born in East Riverton, New Jersey in 1937, Williams studied dance, drama, and art before becoming a stylist at a New York photography studio.

There, her beauty caught the attention of Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr, who frequented the studio to do press shots. The two encouraged Williams, then 17, to take up fashion modeling.

And that was how she was able to break into a stereotyped industry like fashion in the 1950s, working with African-American magazines like Jet and Ebony.

But there was a problem – her dark skin color did not attract many industry folks in America, as non-white models were largely excluded from mainstream fashion. Even within the African-American modeling scene, ladies were expected to be light-skinned.

“I was too dark to be accepted,” Williams once recalled. Facing discrimination while trying to extend her career with other modeling houses, Williams moved to Paris in the 1960s, where she was embraced.

France had a different outlook on black beauty and soon enough, the African-American beauty was modeling for big fashion designers like Christian Dior and Jean Dessès.

“By the end of her tenure she was making a staggering $7,500 a year working part-time and had received three marriage proposals from her French admirers, one of whom kissed her feet and murmured, ‘I worship the ground you walk on, mademoiselle’,” writes arogundade.com

Williams later returned to America, hoping things had changed for models like her. But when she went searching for a new agent in New York City, she realized that there had not been any major change.

Told to wait two hours in the reception of one agency, she was later told that the agency already had a black model and she was not needed. Having had enough of the bias of the fashion industry, Williams took her case to the press.

Some influential media personalities took up her case, exposing the plight of black fashion models in the country and drumming home the need for change.

Eventually, the situation improved, especially for Williams, and she got booked for ads for major brands such as Loom Togs, Modess, and Budweiser.

Her rate also shot up to $100 an hour. Finally, the beautiful, talented and inspirational woman had broken the color barrier in the modeling industry. As more black models became more visible, cosmetic companies began doing a lot of research aimed at developing products for African-American women.

Retiring from modeling in 1970, Williams continued her career in fashion as a stylist. Her courage, however, paved the way for other black models like Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, Duckie Thot, among others.

At 25, Sinenhlanhla is the founder of Passcara and Partners Incorporated based in Durban, South Africa. Her firm focuses on family law and personal injury.

Sinenhlanhla Passcara Mthembu, completed law school and started working with a law firm but she’d always wanted to establish her own business so she quit her job and became her own boss. “It is hard based on my age. People see Law as a difficult field. It is a scary field and a man’s world but I took it as a challenge upon myself to do it.”

“I then decided that no matter what people are actually saying, I’m going for it regardless of my age and the challenges I may face,” she told Power FM.

“It was difficult from the point where I started my degree to where I am now. I don’t regret anything.” She is the only person running the law firm at the moment, according to reports.

Allow me to Introduce myself. My name is Sinenhlanhla Passcara Mthembu and I am the Founder and Director of Passcara and Partners Incorporated. I am a 25 year old and the owner of this Law Firm.
I am to Inspire. If I did it then so can you!!! #GirlsTalkZA pic.twitter.com/fIypgaqTKe

— Sne Mthembu (@Sne_Mthembu_) February 3, 2020

The journey has not been so smooth, butwent it comes to market herself. But she is positive that word-of-mouth marketing from her clients will help her.

“What is hard in our field is marketing yourself. There is a thin line between marketing and touting. Touting is like when you are asking or begging for clients,” she said. “It makes it hard to market because you don’t want to cross that thin line that the [legal] council has put for us.”

Sinenhlanhla is also a content creator at Youtube, who shares beauty tips with her followers.

After 42 years, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has become the first black woman to deliver a Commencement Day speech at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1978, was when then-US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia Harris did so.

Hello WORriors, it’s #WomanCrushWednessday, and our Woman Crush is Kemi Adetiba!

She is a multi award winning movie director, cinematographer, music and video director known for excellent work in the industry, especially the blockbuster movies, ‘The Wedding Party’ and ‘King of boys’. Her works have made appearance in places like BET, Netflix, MTV base, Sound city Tv, amongst others.

Born in Lagos on January 8, 1980,  Adetiba started her journey into the media really young where she headlined two national television commercials for the detergent brand OMO, just like her father, Dele Adetiba, a veteran in the advertising and broadcast industries who played a pivotal role in the development in Nigeria.

In 2007, with a love for storytelling, the law graduate enrolled in the New York Film Academy. Her body of work includes music videos, commercials, television content and films.

The exceptional film-maker and music video director believes the year still holds many promises’. She came out clear with her opinion known through her Twitter and Instagram handles.

She said, “ I think 2020 still has more to offer. There is no pretending it is increasingly becoming harder and harder to remain positive in these peculiar times. It is very natural to want to simply throw your hands in the air and give permission for the year to throw you anywhere and anyhow it wills.

I know it seems unfair to be forced in the position where you have to choose between hunger or health for both yourself and your family, but alas, here we are and there is no running from it.”

She sermonised that lamenting about the situation will not make it disappear, and therefore advised we give it whatever it takes to live our normal lives. “Blinking hard or “woe is me” laments will not make it disappear. But if this THING will not play fair, then neither will we. The only thing sure about LIFE is CHANGE. And as long as you have breath… There is always HOPE!!! No one would have predicted an invisible virus would come shut down the entire world for half the year. This is what you call “humbling!!” But as long as the world is still spinning, we have an obligation to keep pushing,” she added.

She prophesied that when things go wrong, it is only those who spent time warming up, preparing that will gather the most nuts in the end.

She tweeted : “I think 2020 still has more to offer. My dad once said to me “What you lose on the stretch, you gain on the curve.” I pray there is more once we round this bend.”