It's so refreshing to hear black folks come out and talk about their experiences in racist institutions. Feel like we can all breathe and let our bellies hang loose as Lauryn says. So let me get this one off my chest...

So me and a sister were sub-contracted to do some work. Formulating a comms strategy+ for a big multilateral. Ofcourse it's often the case that these bids are gotten by European firms who pocket the huge profits and then sub-contract the work.

So we do the work and go through various drafts, incorporating their feedback. Before we submit a final, they tell us to hold on. We know now they hired someone else - a friend of the boss' who uses our version, turns it into an advocacy strategy (which we were never asked)

In the meantime we share the final version and submit our invoices. They come back to us a month later telling us they can't pay us because of the 'quality'

Now we had access to the version they submitted to the client - and guess what - they had borrowed huge chunks of what we had submitted to them.

So let me ask you this - either it's plagiarism because you're using work you're not paying for

Or

You're using someone's work couching it in additives and other ramblings and refusing to pay for the original work because you complain it's not the quality you were looking for. I can understand that - but if that's not the quality you're looking for, why would you

Submit substantial (I mean substantial) - I even went to through and highlighted everything they had taken from ours and the pages were yellow!

And submit that to the client?

After months and months of wrangling and foul attitudes from their end - and after refusing to settle for the crumbs they threw at us (they told us they'd pay us half and no more) - they finally tried to be 'nice', got on a call, talked real nice like I'd never heard them talk...

And ended up paying us 100% of what we were owed.

All this to say, don't back down when you know you're being bamboozled and hoodwinked.

I knew they would never do this if we were male. White. Not-young. European.

That pissed me off even more.

That they thought they could get away with BS because we were a couple of young, African women. Not today. Not today.

Phoenix Design Aid ( @DNPDA) has reached out to @NjengereR and myself and issued the statement below re the recent tweets by @AdamRogers2030 +

We acknowledge their apology and take note of their willingness to take steps to address the matter.

Here's their tweet https://twitter.com/DNPDA/status/1274016123667623937?s=19