I am a Ugandan-born British criminologist turned mentor. I have worked with institutions across the world, sat in government ministries, negotiated inside multilateral organisations, and chaired the board of a children’s NGO. In nearly every one of those rooms, I was the only African woman. I learned early that the person who controls the narrative controls the room. I also learned that the narrative about an African woman in global institutions — diasporan, professional, intelligent, ambitious — is almost always written by someone else.

So, I write to take that back.

I write for many people, but there is one reader I return to again and again when I write on certain topics. She is young and somewhere between early and mid-career, navigating international spaces that are not fully built for her. She is navigating a professional world that asks her to perform fluency in a culture that is not fully hers. She code-switches before she has even decided what she thinks. She is competent in ways that go unrecognised, and she is tired in ways that are rarely acknowledged. She rarely sees her particular experience described with precision. I write for her.

But I would be dishonest if I did not also name who I am writing against. I am writing against the version of young African women that international institutions allow. The one that is resilient but not authoritative. Present but not powerful. Grateful but not demanding. The one that can be cited as supporting programmes but not trusted to lead them. I have watched that construction operate for more than three decades in policy rooms, conference halls and international leadership spaces.

I am also writing against the diaspora story that tends to flatten complex lives into stories of either achievement or adversity. My experience and those of most diasporan women I know fit neither. We are more interesting than that, and the stories that exist in between achievement and adversity matter. It is often in that space that the most valuable insights are overlooked. The experiences institutions dismiss as anecdotal frequently contain the clearest evidence of how identity, belonging and power are negotiated in everyday life. Lived experience is not anecdotal. It is data, and it reveals the gap between how institutions assume people experience the world and how they actually navigate it.

My perspective as a Ugandan diasporan woman is not incidental to my work on leadership, mentorship, identity and belonging. It is the lens that allows me to see how power moves through a room, what people carry into it, and why certain voices go unheard even when they have the most to offer. Writing is where I make that visible. The Impact Leaders Initiative is where I put many of those observations into practice - through leadership development, mentorship and community for emerging leaders who are navigating questions of identity, belonging and influence.

I write because the young African women coming after me deserve better than the simplified versions often presented in international spaces. They deserve the full picture: the ambition, the negotiation, the discipline, the uncertainty, the compromises, and the ongoing work of belonging.

I am writing for the young African woman who is educated, capable and quietly exhausted by the invisible labour of belonging. The one who has mastered adaptation but rarely sees her own experience named with precision. I am writing against the system that permits young African women to be present only when they are grateful, resilient and unthreatening. I am writing against the diaspora story that flattens complex lives into stories of either achievement or adversity.

That is why I write. I write so that young African women can move through international spaces without having to diminish themselves to belong. I write so that their experiences are recognised not as anecdotes but as knowledge. And I write to ensure that the institutions they enter can no longer claim they did not know the compromises, adaptations and acts of self-erasure that belonging too often requires.

I was born in Uganda. My formative years unfolded in Ghana, first at a Ghanaian primary school, then at an international school where a hybrid British American accent began to take shape, and later at boarding school where conversations moved effortlessly between English, pidgin English and local languages. Adaptation became an early lesson in belonging. I learnt to navigate conversations I did not always fully understand and social cues that were not entirely my own. What I did not realise then was that I was learning the foundations of code-switching long before I knew the term. Those experiences continued throughout my international career. They were not disruptions. They were an education.

Then came the United Kingdom, and everything I understood about adaptation was quietly recalibrated. I noticed it first on the telephone when I made a call to a government office in London. I heard the tone on the other end, and something shifted in my voice before I was fully aware of it. The cadence changed. The vowels flattened. The traces of Uganda and Ghana that still surface in certain conversations receded, and a more recognisable British voice came forward. It happened in seconds, but it had been happening for years, at university and then in my professional life.

That is what code-switching sounds like from the inside. It is not dramatic, and not always deliberate. It is just a quiet recalibration. Code-switching is often framed as performance, as though one is concealing something true beneath something strategic. I have never found that explanation adequate. What I do when I move between environments is the result of years spent navigating different cultures and institutions, learning when to adapt, when to translate, and when to remain firmly myself.

I have been told by some Africans that I sound British. I have been told by non-Africans that I sound British but still pronounce certain words like an African. Neither observation is wrong.

What interests me is the assumption behind them: that one identity must somehow sit above the others. Age and experience have taught me otherwise. The different versions are not competing. They are simply part of the same story.

Uganda gave me an origin. Ghana gave me adaptability and an introduction to what a layered identity is. The UK and the world gave me professional rigour, institutional literacy and an accent that surprises people when they learn where I am from. And then I ring home.

A familiar voice answers. My speech softens. Expressions I have not used for months appear effortlessly. In those moments, I know that nothing was ever lost. Some parts of identity simply wait for the right conversation to reappear. These are not competing versions of myself. They are different registers of the same instrument.

Identity is not a place you arrive at. It is an ongoing negotiation between memory, belonging and adaptation. The work is not choosing which voice is most authentic but recognising that they all are.

Does my accent tell a story? Let’s talk.

Available for keynote speaking engagements on leadership, identity, diaspora experience and navigating global institutions through lived experience. Media Kit

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We often speak about international life through its visible outcomes. Careers built. Opportunities gained. Lives remade across borders. But ageing in the diaspora reveals something less visible and far more internal. It forces you to confront what migration has gradually edited out of you and what, despite everything, has remained.

Yet even after years of adaptation as one from the diaspora, certain parts of ourselves remain intact. Cultural memory reveals itself in small things. The way respect is expressed towards elders. The difficulty of addressing older people by first name, even when the culture around you expects it. The instinct to cook in quantity, because guests may arrive unannounced and must never leave hungry. These habits remain long after other things have shifted.

Language carries another kind of memory, and its loss is also an emotional one. Certain expressions from childhood cannot survive translation into English. Humour changes. The particular texture of a mother tongue, its capacity for precision and warmth, does not fully transfer. The loss appears small from the outside. Internally, it carries weight.

Then there is the additional layer of being observed losing yourself. The gentle and sometimes less gentle remarks from others that you have become somehow less African. That the in-between place you occupy is somehow incomplete. It is meant lightly but it does not always land lightly. Over time, though, I have come to know that living between cultures is not evidence of loss alone. It is also evidence of survival, adaptation and the ability to carry more than one world within yourself. Perhaps this is why many people become more reflective with age. Earlier in life, achievement matters greatly. Titles. Institutions. Recognition. Over time, attention shifts towards what remains meaningful enough to pass on.

In the diaspora, we become custodians of memory. We become carriers, moving through time with stories, habits and fragments of cultural continuity that were never fully ours to keep, only to pass forward. Younger generations inherit those fragments differently. They may not fully speak our languages or understand the social worlds that shaped us. What remains are pieces. A surname. A traditional name. A recipe. A traditional song. A dance. A way of greeting elders. A sense of responsibility that feels inherited. Sometimes younger people return parts of ourselves back to us. Through their questions and curiosity, they bring to the surface histories and values we had stopped speaking aloud.

Ageing in the diaspora has taught me that a layered identity is never fully resolved. You do not entirely leave home behind, nor do you fully remain the person who once left it. Perhaps that is the true diaspora within. Not the distance between countries, but the quiet distance between who we were, who we became, and what still remains unchanged beneath it all. Ageing in the diaspora is not simply the story of losing parts of yourself. It is also the story of learning how to live honestly with layered identities, inherited memories and multiple forms of belonging.

Over time, you realise that the in-between place you occupy is not incomplete after all. It is simply where several worlds meet. Africa Day reminds those of us in the diaspora that we are not only carrying memory. We are also part of what the continent continues to become.

Happy Africa Day 2026.

There has always been this quiet assumption that one day, after all these years away, I would return and do something meaningful for the people and the place I was born. I have often asked myself whether giving back should just be about money, or whether it could be something else.

Many in the diaspora send remittances home regularly, keeping households afloat, economies stronger, children in school and, in many countries, surpassing foreign aid. The list is endless and it shows that money matters enormously. But could giving back also be something less tangible, something shaped by distance and sharpened by experience that cannot be wired home through a bank transfer?

Leaving Uganda and building a career across continents taught me things I could not have learned any other way. With over three decades working with criminal justice officials in more than twenty countries, I learned how power operates inside government institutions, the unwritten rules of international organisations, how decisions really get made, how leadership is expressed differently across cultures, how to navigate spaces where African women were routinely underrepresented, and how to hold your ground with confidence in rooms where you are the only African woman at the table.

I learned to translate ideas into action across languages, legal systems and political contexts. These were not lessons from a classroom. They were earned across four continents, navigating volatile political and economic environments, leading diverse teams and managing multi-million-pound budgets. Those lessons cannot be packaged and sent home. The experience lives in the body and has been tested under pressure. The question I eventually had to sit with was what to do with all of this. I could have kept the knowledge and experience to myself, and many in the diaspora do. Instead, I chose to make it useful to someone else.

Now retired from direct institutional work, that choice is at the heart of my work with emerging leaders, mostly young women from Africa and in the diaspora. What I give back is perspective forged inside systems of power, policy and governance across continents. I help young women understand how to position themselves in global spaces, how to carry authority without apology, and how to lead with both confidence and integrity. I help them read the room in contexts not designed for them, and navigate multicultural environments without losing themselves.

This is what we underestimate when we talk about giving back. The conversation gravitates almost entirely toward money, and I do not dismiss the importance of that. However, lived experience should be seen as a form of capital too. It carries insight, judgement and perspective that cannot be acquired any other way. When shared with intention, it becomes something others can use to shape their own path in leadership and public life. That is a transfer of something generational.

For me, giving back is also about building a bridge between my layered identities: from where I was born, where I have been, where I am now, and where me and others are trying to go. It is about offering a way of seeing, thinking and practising leadership that is grounded, globally aware and rooted in responsibility to shape generations.

The remittance is real and it matters. So is this.

The diaspora carries something that cannot be quantified. If we are serious about what giving back means, we must make room for both - the remittances and the capital of lived experience.