Usher’s mother, Jonnetta Patton, is opening a restaurant. As AFROTECH™ previously reported, Patton had once been in business as a manager to Usher, born Usher Terry Raymond IV, for 17 years. She played a part in helping to reshape his image on his own terms, which later proved to be a wise decision. “During the time between that first record and the second record, I worked in silence. I didn’t tell the record label what I was doing,” Patton said in an interview on OWN’s “Behind Every Man.” “So now Usher said, ‘This time I’m gonna do it my way.’ So LA [LA Reid] said, ‘Okay. All right, Usher.’ See, they wanted him to be this bad boy image. Usher’s not a bad boy. That’s that whole image that they wanted. It didn’t work. So Usher said, ‘I’m gonna do it my way,’ and that’s basically what we did.” Usher released “My Way,” the album that gave him his first No. 1 record. “What you see on ‘My Way,’ you just see raw talent,” Usher said during the interview. “This is a true testament to an...

Mary J. Blige’s Strength Of A Woman Festival (SOAW) returned for a Mother’s Day takeover in a new city this year, along with new faces and places to support. “We started doing pop-ups at bars, and it was just me and my daughter,” Chef Shelly Flash of 2 Girls & A Cookshop told AFROTECH™ during the third annual SOAW, the festival’s first time appearing in Blige’s home of New York, NY. “We used to get kicked out all the time, and it’s like we just had a mission. We were like, ‘We should share our food with the world because we’re first-gens, and a lot of times first-generation Jamaicans, we’re not represented.’ Either you’re all in the culture or you’re in this melted pot. We are always in this floating melting pot. We live in the best city in the world — that’s New York — and so what we decided to do is just keep putting out one Jamaican taco at a time.” She added, “And in Jamaica, we always say ‘Out of many, one person.’ At 2 Girls we say, ‘Out of many, one culture.’ We believe that...

Climbing up the corporate ladder led this Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) alumna to make history in the restaurant industry.

The phrase “Africa to the world” can serve as a wake-up call to those sleeping on what the continent has to offer. Some of the world’s brightest minds come from Africa. Still, the lack of mainstream visibility and connections creates barriers to opportunities, which is why Ronnie Kwesi Coleman’s mission is to keep African talent from having their skills overlooked. In 2019, the Ghanaian tech innovator co-founded Meaningful Gigs, a D.C.-based startup that connects highly skilled African designers with top companies and enterprises such as Starbucks, IDEO, Bloomberg, and Meta. Coleman’s efforts to create the marketplace are linked to filling the staggering gap in African countries’ income classes. “The thought was how do we create jobs and build a thriving middle class in Africa. And then our vision was to create 100,000 skilled jobs,” Coleman told AfroTech. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Meaningful Gigs (@meaningfulgigs) Coleman spoke with us about connecting with...

It’s National Equal Pay Day, and Hired.com just released its report on the gender pay gap across industries. Women in the workplace have historically been compensated less than their male peers for doing the same job — 60 percent of these men are paid more than women now. According to the study, the technology industry has a 3 percent wage gap which is a 1 percentage point improvement from two years ago. San Francisco had the smallest gender wage gap, followed by New York, Seattle, Boston, and Los Angeles. San Francisco’s booming tech scene plays a large part in its shrinking wage gap; however, it may not be the best city for women in tech. A separate study by SmartAsset found that Washington, D.C. ranks as the city with the best pay for women in tech with women making 95 percent of what men do. The survey also said that D.C. has more tech women workers and those employees have more income after housing costs. Although tech’s wage gap is making improvements , this progress may only...