Afua Hagan – Keynote Speaker

TV & Radio Presenter, regularly appears on ITV, BBC, LBC, Times Radio and talkRADIO, Diversity and Inclusion Speaker, Event Host, Moderator, Royal Commentator

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Afua Hagan Profile Picture

Specialist Subjects

  • My personal journey
  • On race, ethnicity and culture
  • Inclusivity in the workplace
  • On effective communication to bring about real change
  • Music
  • Inspiration
  • Adversity
  • Confidence
  • Self-Belief
  • Resilience
  • Entertainment
  • Health and Beauty
  • Unconscious Bias
  • Black Lives Matter
  • Gender Bias
  • The Environment
  • Personal Development
  • COVID-19 Challenges

Language

  • English

Biography

Opinionated, charismatic and provocative – Afua Hagan is one of the leading voices on diversity in Britain.

A TV News Anchor, Commentator, Journalist and award-winning Broadcaster, Afua is in high demand, regularly appearing on ITV’s This Morning, Good Morning Britain, Jeremy Vine on Channel 5, the BBC, Sky and CNN. She is a distinguished Commentator on the British Royal Family, featuring on UK and international outlets.

Afua also appears on STV, Yanga! TV, LBC, Times Radio and talkRADIO and has been honoured for her work in Broadcasting by the Black Women in Business Awards. Afua is an excellent Diversity and Inclusion Keynote Speaker and Moderator.

A passionate and experienced journalist, Afua hosted the TV show “Sustainable Energy” for CNBC, wrote a column for The Voice Newspaper and was Editor-in-Chief for Glam Africa Magazine.

She moved to London from Glasgow aged 17 to study journalism at City University. After specialising in broadcast and music, Afua found herself working at T4 and PopWorld before moving on to the dizzy heights of 60 Minute Makeover on ITV. She grew bored of decorating strangers’ homes in an hour or under and made the leap to music publishing where she worked for Blue Mountain Music under the watchful and legendary eye of Chris Blackwell.

Following her passion as a writer, Afua landed a job at Blackhair as Editorial Assistant, rising to be Editor after only a year. She became the Features Editor for Pride magazine and a Producer and Anchor for Arise News. After switching to ABN TV, she produced and presented the popular show Young & Rising and launched Entertainment Weekly. Afua is a great supporter of the UK and international music scene, especially in the world of Afrobeats and was the host of The A-List on The Beat 103.6FM.

Afua is a brilliant keynote speaker covering issues such as Diversity, Black Lives Matter and Equality for Women and continues to work as an Event Host and Moderator. Clients have included Retail Week, the NHS, Cambridgeshire Police, Compare the Market and Inmarsat.

Afua lives and works in London. In her spare time she likes to make up dance routines with her daughter, have manicures and read crime novels.

Popular Talks by Afua Hagan

My personal journey

In this talk Afua will let you into her personal journey as a broadcaster and journalist and the impact the events of 2020 had on my career. On a really personal level it was tough, being a Black woman living in a world that seemed to hate Black people. What happened afterwards, was also tough.

It was great to be offered platforms to speak about what happened and what she felt should happen next in terms of talking issues of diversity and inclusion in the UK. But Afua often felt like a token. And she often wondered to herself, is she on this channel because she is a Black, dark-skinned female journalist who can talk about race and ticks a box or is she on this channel simply because she is a good journalist?

She still has those questions today. Lots of companies came out to support the idea of Diversity and Inclusion in those days and weeks after the death of George Floyd. They rightly recognised the need for change. But it’s much more than – let’s hire more Black folks! It’s not just inviting Black people to have a seat at the table, but asking them to be part of the decision-making team on who’s at the table in the first place. That’s real inclusivity.

You might have a lovely working culture and a great office environment but are you truly inclusive? Do you have Black people in the upper echelons of the organisation making decisions?

On race, ethnicity and culture

In this talk Afua look at difference between race, ethnicity and culture and how that affects the way that we interact with people. Now, you would be forgiven for thinking that race and ethnicity and more or less the same thing. But they actually mean very different things.

We sometimes use the words culture, ethnicity and race interchangeably, and whilst there is some overlap between the terms, it’s important to know the differences between them, and to use them correctly.

When you distinguish what separates race from culture and ethnicity, it becomes apparent that racism, apart from being hurtful, just doesn’t make sense. Both race and ethnicity, it’s argued, are socially defined. Neither is biologically valid.

But even more than that, when we examine the genetics of different racial groups, there’s more genetic difference within any one racial group compared to the average between them, and yet amongst all of us, we are so remarkably similar (99.9% alike in fact). Yes, there may be some value in grouping people into racial groups, but at the end of the day, we have much more in common with each other than we don’t.

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