Mahboba Rawi was a teenager when the Soviet-Afghan War broke out. She led protests against Soviet control in her high school. After she was nearly arrested, she decided to flee the country. Along with millions of others, Mahboba made the ten day walk to the border with Pakistan, not knowing whether she would ever see the relatives she was leaving behind again. Eventually, she married an Afghan-Australian man and settled with him in Australia. Life took another tragic turn when her son drowned in...
Aug 17, 2015•27 min
Agony aunt Criselda Kananda found out she was HIV positive 16 years ago and was given two years to live. Determined to change her fate, the South African discovered that most of the information available about the illness was full of stereotypes and judgements. So she made it her mission to help others and became a well-known radio and TV presenter, offering advice on health and well-being. But this is not an easy job. She reveals that in order to cope with other people's pain and emotions she g...
Aug 03, 2015•27 min
Maureen Kamari's cakes were always a hit in her office. They were so popular with her colleagues that they started to pay her to bake birthday cakes. Maureen realised she could turn her skills into a business and set up Amari Quickbreads, a bakery delivery service. She also passes her kitchen know-how on to other would-be cooks by giving training sessions. However, Maureen reveals that her path to success hasn't always been an easy one and she's had to learn how to recover from failure quickly. ...
Jul 27, 2015•27 min
Captain Niloofar Rahmani is a pilot in the Afghan Air Force. Although there were female helicopter pilots before her, she is the first woman in the history of Afghanistan's military to fly a fixed-wing plane. The 23-year-old takes charge of cargo planes which are used to carry people and supplies to conflict zones. She was inspired, she says, "by my father's dreams." After Niloofar's story was first publicised she began to receive threats from the Taliban and others in Afghanistan who thought he...
Jul 20, 2015•27 min
Jane Serwanga started her career with ambitions of being a high-earning commercial lawyer, but a revelation that the law can discriminate against women inspired her to enter women's rights law . Now she works with Equality Now, an international women's rights advocacy organisation. She might be working on a case defending the rights of one woman to inherit property or be safe from violence, but she and her colleagues will be thinking strategically about how to use that case to bring about change...
Jul 06, 2015•27 min
Grammy award-winning backing singer Lisa Fischer has been performing with The Rolling Stones since 1989. She says duetting with Mick Jagger is electric, "he's unpredictable and he's exciting and he's mischievous". Lisa grew up in a musical family and trained to be an opera singer, but soon swapped the theatre for the New York club scene. She describes Luther Vandross as her mentor; he taught her to "wait, listen and don't sing while I'm trying to teach you the part". Lisa says the key to being a...
Jun 29, 2015•27 min
Elizabeth Stone has swum for Team USA in three Paralympic Games and has won three medals. Her achievements are all the more surprising because she started life in a Georgian orphanage. Elizabeth got her first prosthetic at 4 years old and not wearing it in the water is part of the reason she loves her sport. Her sporting fame led to an emotional reunion with her birth family in Georgia. Elizabeth is now considering whether to take up the triathlon. Vanessa Low joins us fresh from setting a new w...
Jun 22, 2015•27 min
Lorena Feijoo is a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. Lorena was born into the world of ballet in her native Havana. Her mother was a dancer with Cuba's National Ballet and she remembers being looked after by the costume managers whilst her mum was performing. Her sister Lorna also followed in her footsteps and Lorena is now married to a dancer, she has performed with both of them. Lorena's career has taken her to Europe and America, but she is always grateful for the free ballet tr...
Jun 15, 2015•27 min
Colombian Tatiana Calderón has gone from a teenage go-kart champion to a Formula 3 driver who reaches 280 kph at top speed. Her sights are set firmly on Formula 1. Tatiana is mentored by one of F1's most prominent women, the test driver Susie Wolff, and she describes how that's helped her handle other people's doubts about her abilities. Aggression on the track, training hard in the gym, and technical know-how are Tatiania's tactics for achieving her dream to get spotted by an F1 team. Ramona Ka...
Jun 08, 2015•27 min
When Maria Luisa Catrambone helps to treat children who have serious burns and bloody injuries she says you need to control your facial expressions carefully and not show any sign of shock, so you don't scare them. This is something the teenager has learnt to do when going on rescue missions with the Migrant Offshore Aid Station - saving men, women and children from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, where thousands of migrants have lost their lives trying to reach Europe in the past year. Maria...
Jun 01, 2015•27 min
Naballah Chi is a 25-year-old fashion blogger, model and hijab stylist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her blog celebrates colourful clothes inspired by her Caribbean island home, but it also addresses the concerns and questions of her followers. Naballah has worn the hijab since kindergarten, but as an aspiring model she acknowledges that keeping the commitment can be a struggle and describes the guilt she felt when she removed it to take part in a beauty pageant. Hidaya Mohamad is a Javanese-Malaysi...
May 25, 2015•27 min
Cecilia Braekhus is considered one of the best female boxers, pound for pound, in the world. She's known in the ring as'The First Lady, because she was the first woman to be taken on by one of Europe's biggest boxing promoters and has held all of the major boxing belts simultaneously. It hasn't been easy for Cecilia to make it in her career: boxing was banned in her native Norway until 2014, so she had to move to Germany to succeed. But she was highly motivated and admits: "The people who do thi...
May 18, 2015•27 min
Kira Lea Dargin's parents met at church. Her mother is white from a Russian family who emigrated to Australia in the 1950s, and her father is Aboriginal Australian. Being "mixed" Kira says, means constantly having to explain how you came about or how your family manages to blend. Having come through some difficult times as a teenager Kira now happily identifies with both of her cultural backgrounds. As the director of 'Aboriginal Model Management Australia', her mission is to help broaden how Au...
May 11, 2015•27 min
Emily Otali is a primatologist from Uganda. She's been told that she's the first black African woman to earn a PhD in the subject. On an early field trip she broke the rules and made direct eye-contact with a female chimpanzee, but that was the moment she 'fell in love' and found her vocation. Emily's job now is to observe a community of chimpanzees in Uganda's Kibale National Park and study their behaviour from dawn to sunset, and from birth until death. She says there's a deeper purpose to the...
Apr 27, 2015•27 min
Leslea Newman has written more than sixty children's books. She says she can't remember a time when she didn't want to be a writer. As a teenager Leslea got her work published in magazines and she also worked as Alan Ginsberg's apprentice. When a friend told her she couldn't find any books for her daughter that portrayed a family like hers, with two lesbian parents, Leslea decided she needed to do something and wrote the children's picture book Heather has two Mommies. When it was published in 1...
Apr 18, 2015•27 min
Luisa Clasen AKA Lully is a video blogger, or "vlogger" from Brazil. Her vlogs about art and culture, shot from her apartment in Rio de Janeiro, have attracted nearly 180,000 YouTube subscribers. Lully launched her channel giving fashion tips, but then refocused it on her first passion, filmmaking. Advertisers love her, so Lully's able to make a living from her online posts. She says she's nicer than the average vlogger and gives a balanced opinion, which "scares trolls". Lully doesn't use bad l...
Apr 04, 2015•27 min
Nneka Egbuna is a Nigerian German songwriter and performer. She grew up in Warri in the Delta region of Nigeria and travels the world performing and writing, but still it is her home country and its problems which move her to make music. She says, "It's pain, mainly pain, that does inspire me". Nneka writes her songs on her own and plays guitar and drums as well using various computer applications to create loops and beats. Her influences range from Fela Kuti and Bob Marley to Dolly Parton. She ...
Mar 30, 2015•27 min
Chika Anadu is a self-taught film-maker who wrote, produced and directed her first feature film, the acclaimed B for Boy, in 2013. After studying law in the UK she went back to her home country Nigeria to shoot her film - a contemporary drama which reflects the tension between modern and traditional values in middle-class family life in Lagos. Its central character is a female TV producer who is under pressure to have a baby boy. Chika says, "you tell the stories that you know... I'm Nigerian, I...
Mar 23, 2015•27 min
Irish striker Stephanie Roche fell in love with football from an early age. She went to matches with her dad and brothers and played on boys' teams before joining girls' sides from the age of 13. Her opponents were surprised to see a girl on the pitch and says she would sometimes get a bit of abuse from players and parents "but nothing too bad". The insults didn't bother her though, she just focussed on her game. Stephanie went on to represent her country, as well as playing for local teams. It ...
Mar 16, 2015•27 min
Aowen Jin is from China but has lived and worked in the UK for 18 years. Originally trained as a lawyer, she swapped a life at the bar for a life at the easel and now her work is in the Queen's private collection. Before the civil war Sara Shamma was a star of the blossoming Syrian art scene. She carried on painting in Damascus for as long as she could - starting on a series called Diaspora. By the time she finished it, she was herself part of the Syrian diaspora, having fled to neighbouring Leb...
Mar 09, 2015•27 min
Salima Ikram was born in Pakistan and got hooked on ancient Egyptian artefacts through the pictures in a childhood book. Her fate as an Egyptologist was sealed when she came face-to-face, aged nine, with mesmerising statues in the Cairo museum; she decided then that finding out more about them would be her life's work. "Archaeologists are people who never grew up" she says. When not lecturing at the American University in Cairo, Salima will be somewhere dry, dusty, and dirty, recording ancient i...
Mar 02, 2015•27 min
Annise Parker is the mayor of Houston, Texas, the oil and gas capital of America. She once worked in this industry, but says her day job was supporting her "volunteer habit" and eventually gave it up to serve her community full-time. Annise climbed the rungs of local government to become the first openly gay mayor of a major US city in 2010. Her election caused an international media frenzy because of her sexuality. "The perception was Houston was a very conservative, sort of backwards place tha...
Feb 23, 2015•27 min
Naamah Kelman was the first woman to be ordained a rabbi in Israel in 1992. She belongs to the liberal Reform movement in Judaism and so her office isn't recognised by Orthodox Jews. She says, "women in our family were supposed to marry rabbis ... and give birth to rabbis" but her father gave her the support she needed to break the mould, study for years, and eventually become a leader. Naamah was influenced by the feminist movement to follow her religious calling despite the fears some in her o...
Feb 16, 2015•27 min
MC Melodee is a rapper from Amsterdam who grew up listening to cassette tapes of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. From a young age Melodee says she loved playing with language and creating rhymes. Melodee says she went to university to please her parents, but when she graduated she chose a career in music, rather than a steady office job. That decision paid off and now MC Melodee has rocked venues around the world and set up her own female collective, Dam Dutchess, to coach, promote and enco...
Feb 09, 2015•27 min
At the age of 28 Ky Furneaux swapped her job as a guide in the Australian outback for stunt work in Hollywood. "I don't think I really realised it was gonna hurt," she says of this sometimes "brutal" industry. Now aged 41 Ky is a veteran of more than 60 films including Catwoman, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Thor. She has a reputation for taking "hard hits" but admits that the first time someone punched her in the face, she cried. She won a Taurus award which is the stunt industry's equivalent of a...
Feb 02, 2015•27 min
Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra has been described as a 'rock star' of the classical world. At a concert as a child her father asked her what a conductor does - "nothing" she replied. So he enlightened her and explained that the conductor does "everything". This ignited a curiosity, which soon led to an unstoppable passion and in her early 20s Alondra set up the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas to showcase Latin music. She is now also a guest conductor with some of the greatest orche...
Jan 26, 2015•27 min
When Houriya Kazim became the United Arab Emirates' first ever woman surgeon in the late 1990s she chose to specialise in breast surgery. Accusations of immodesty and even pornography followed as Houriya's educational pamphlets fell foul of the authorities' restrictions on language and images of women's bodies. Despite making progress in encouraging women to check their breasts for signs of cancer she has seen tumours so advanced that they have burst out of the skin. She describes how when that ...
Jan 19, 2015•27 min
When celebrity chef Farah Quinn first appeared on screens in Indonesia, people were not quite sure what to make of her. Viewers were used to male chefs, so making her mark was not easy. Critics quibbled about her talents saying they lay in her looks rather than her culinary achievements, but Farah says this is unfair and she has worked hard to get to where she is, starting at the bottom and running her own restaurant. Russian chef Marianna Orlinkova can relate to working in a tough, male-dominat...
Jan 12, 2015•27 min
Two women in the field of psychiatry discuss the demands and satisfaction that comes from working in Uganda and Pakistan, where there is still a stigma around mental health and mental health professionals. Dr Margaret Mungherera was the first African woman to be elected president of the World Medical Association, a role she held from 2013 until quite recently. Dr Mungherera was one of only six psychiatrists in Uganda when she started out at the country's largest mental health hospital where she ...
Jan 05, 2015•27 min
Amatalalim Alsoswa was Yemen's first female minister before becoming the country's first woman Ambassador. Her mission to the Netherlands began serenely in 2000 but, she tells us, she had to deal with a dramatic change of attitudes towards Yemen after the September 11 attacks the following year. Amat's recipe for success is a mixture of outspokenness and openness - a combination which helped her cope with a fatwa issued against her when she was seen on television without a headscarf (it had slip...
Dec 29, 2014•27 min
