Baroness June Sarpong OBE

Baroness June Sarpong OBE is a diversity and inclusion speaker, broadcaster and author with more than two decades of experience in the UK and the US. She was the BBC's first Director of Creative Diversity and the first Black woman to sit on the corporation's Executive Committee. In August 2026 she joined the House of Lords as a life peer.

At the BBC she led diversity and inclusion strategy across programming, internal creative teams and the external production supply chain. She spearheaded the Creative Diversity Commitment, a £100 million investment in diverse and inclusive TV content, with a further £12 million for inclusive radio and podcasts.

June is the founder of Diversify International, a consultancy whose clients include Burberry, Barclays, Nike, the NHS, EY, Google and Unilever. She advises founders and CEOs on inclusion strategy, culture transformation and reaching new audiences and growth markets, with particular expertise on Africa.

She co-created the Women: Inspiration & Enterprise (WIE) Network, launched in New York in 2010, in the UK in 2012 and in Africa in 2014, which has a community of more than 200,000 women worldwide. With the UN's International Telecommunication Union she initiated the DNA Summit, whose outcomes were presented to world leaders at the G8. She is also co-creator of the EQL-Pledge, which encourages venture capital investment in diverse-founded companies, and an ambassador for London Tech Week.

Over a 25-year broadcasting career June has hosted Make Poverty History in Trafalgar Square, the UK leg of Live Earth and Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday celebration in Hyde Park in front of 30,000 people. From 2015 to 2020 she co-hosted Sky News's weekly current affairs programme The Pledge.

She is the author of three books published by HarperCollins: Diversify, The Power of Women and The Power of Privilege. Diversify sets out the hidden cost of exclusion and six steps to overcome unconscious bias, drawing on research from the University of Oxford.

June was appointed MBE in 2007 for services to broadcasting and charity and OBE in 2020. She is a Lifetime Fellow of the RSA and has worked with the Prince's Trust for two decades, as well as with the United Nations and anti-poverty and gender equality charities.