You can see that women enjoy music because they like dancing and singing and we have some very nice singers, like Cecile Kayirebwa and Florida Uwera and others.

Female artists are fighting to exist. For sure we have a lot of female musicians in Mali but most of the time the projects and their music belong to men – husbands, producer, management. Musically we are not always free. I hope in the future there will be more female artists who can express themselves freely and compose instead of just singing.

Being a singer, involves marketing yourself, but being a woman, this is very tricky, I try to stick to our values and remain proud of myself as a Rwandan woman

I used to belong to the school of thought that females in the Nigerian music industry were disenfranchised. However, knowledge, time, maturity and research made me realise it's the effect of our traditional beliefs that the girl-child is positioned to play a second fiddle.

Looking at where I am at I say it is God's grace. What I know is that when I was growing up I saw myself on TV but I never thought that one day I’d be where I am on Friday. God has made it happen for me. Winning the two awards just proves that women are capable of presenting African traditional music shows. The statuettes encourage me to even work harder though many male maskandi fans still believe in a male presenter. What people do not know is that radio is my life and I grew up singing maskandi. I am Zulu woman who is proud of her culture that is why I enjoy presenting the show

I am known through Sweden as a Rwandan girl due to singing and making records of Rwandan culture and guess what, has made me famous and earns me a living, basically it pays my bills

Before you wouldn't find women driving taxis here, and now you see it. There are men who cook now in Rwanda, when, in an African culture, women have to cook. So I think eventually things change. If you really work hard and you prove that you can do something well, I don't think there's a question of you being a woman, it doesn't come into the equation.

Women are afraid to sing salsa…I don't know why; maybe they think it's for men. I am not a composer, or a soneo, a singer and a poet, which is very difficult. But I think everybody can sing everything.

These differences can make it difficult for female musicians to enter male-dominated musical cultures.

I am known through Sweden as a Rwandan girl due to singing and making records of Rwandan culture and guess what, has made me famous and earns me a living, basically it pays my bills.

Women are still a relative rarity in rock bands, and studies of women's experiences with pop and rock music have indicated that girls are socialized to pop and rock music differently from boys: boys and young men tend to learn songs by ear and talk about popular music's technical aspects, while girls and young women tend to focus on lyrics rather than on equipment and instrumentation, and to resist learning songs by ear. Miki Bernyi's experience testifies to the truthfulness of those findings:

It was not easy to start doing music as a woman, as a young girl, because music was not seen as a profession. Musicians were considered as people who drink or do drugs.

A lot of women play guitar very respectfully, and they play with the guitar; they don't play it—they play with it.

I think Rwandan women have been working together, We don't just look out for ourselves.