The Wednesday, March 31 edition of Africa400 examines the issue of Colorism; The Bluest Eye, as Mama Tomiko and Baba Ty welcome Special Guests Dr. Anita Oghenekome Benson and Amira Adawa.
DR. ANITA OGHENEKOME BENSON
Dr. Anita Oghenekome Benson is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow and a Fellow of the Center for Global Business Studies, Howard University. She is a Medical Doctor with over a decade of clinical and research experience, a Consultant Physician, Dermatologist & Venereologist with experience in HIV and infectious diseases. She is also a public health expert with a Master’s in public health from the University of Sheffield and a fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health. She is a youth mentor, gender expert, award winning blogger and a story teller. She is the Founder of the Embrace Melanin Initiative.
Embrace Melanin’s Vision
To eradicate colorism and skin lightening practices from Africa and raise a generation of young Africans who embrace their melanin and are empowered, educated and self-aware.
Objectives
1. Educate- Raise awareness on the harmful effects of skin lightening practices and change the perception of dark skin through outreaches, the media and specialised programs.
2. Empower- empower the youth to be ‘proudly African’ through personal development, capacity building, skill acquisition and community development.
3. Influence- influence policies that restrict the sale of harmful skin lightening agents in Africa and address colorism especially in the workplace.
4. Rehabilitate- Provide dermatological and psychosocial services for people who suffer from adverse effects of skin lightening practices and set up a skin rehabilitation clinic, the first of its kind in Africa.
5. Innovate- start a skin care line exclusively for African skin suitable for healthy, glowing skin without altering the skin tone.
AMIRA ADAWA
Amira Adawa is an advocate with more than 14 years working in Public Health. She is also the Founder and 
Executive Director of The Beautywell Project, a nonprofit dedicated to educational outreach, research and policy advocacy.
BeautyWell Project designed a program called the Young Women’s Wellness and Leadership Initiative. BeautyWell recruits young girls between the ages of 14 and 18, from public schools and charter schools. And they go through 18-week, designed sessions. BeautyWell matches them with women of color who look like them, who are in a leadership position to mentor them.
Ms. Adawa successfully petitioned Amazon last summer to take down more than a dozen skin-lightening creams in egregious violation of the country’s parts-per-million mercury limit. (Some contained almost 100,000 parts of the harmful chemical; the legal allowance is 1.
Ms. Adawa hosts a weekly call-in show called Beauty-Wellness Talk.
Listen to the March 31 edition of Africa400 here:
Africa400 is heard every Wednesday at 2:00 PM Eastern Time (United States) on HANDRadio (https://www.handradio.org). After the broadcast, the show can also be listened to on HANDRadio’s archive, an updated version of this post and the Media Pages of KUUMBAReport (https://kuumbareport.com/about-kuumbareport-newsletter/multimedia/), KUUMBAEvents (https://kuumbaevents.com/communications/media-page/) and the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (https://srdcinternational.org/?page_id=1558).