Grammy award-winning backing singer Lisa Fischer has been performing with The Rolling Stones since 1989. She says duetting with Mick Jagger is electric, "he's unpredictable and he's exciting and he's mischievous". Lisa grew up in a musical family and trained to be an opera singer, but soon swapped the theatre for the New York club scene. She describes Luther Vandross as her mentor; he taught her to "wait, listen and don't sing while I'm trying to teach you the part". Lisa says the key to being a good backing singer is to listen to what the artist says, and to "what they don't say".Kanika Kapoor is an award-winning performer who has made her name as a 'playback' singer in Indian cinema. Leading actresses in the all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood musical blockbusters mime to her vocals. Kanika says you have to "become" the actress, because "body language has to come out of your vocals". She was classically trained from a young age, but her voice has only recently become the soundtrack of some of India's biggest films. She sang the song Lovely for Deepika Padukone in the hit movie Happy New Year and recently won the Filmfare award for Best Female Playback Singer, for the song Baby Doll.(Picture: Lisa Fischer (left). Credit: Djeneba Aduayom. Kanika Kapoor (right) Credit: Tim Whitby/Getty Images]

Elizabeth Stone has swum for Team USA in three Paralympic Games and has won three medals. Her achievements are all the more surprising because she started life in a Georgian orphanage. Elizabeth got her first prosthetic at 4 years old and not wearing it in the water is part of the reason she loves her sport. Her sporting fame led to an emotional reunion with her birth family in Georgia. Elizabeth is now considering whether to take up the triathlon. Vanessa Low joins us fresh from setting a new world record. The German long-jump star lost her legs as a teenager after being hit by a train. It took almost 3 years for her to walk confidently on her prosthetic legs and she talks about her disappointment in the way they looked and felt. Now Vanessa is training hard for the 2016 Paralympics in Rio but points out that without adequate funding she can barely afford to pay for her running legs. Presenter: Kim Chakanetsa

Lorena Feijoo is a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. Lorena was born into the world of ballet in her native Havana. Her mother was a dancer with Cuba's National Ballet and she remembers being looked after by the costume managers whilst her mum was performing. Her sister Lorna also followed in her footsteps and Lorena is now married to a dancer, she has performed with both of them. Lorena's career has taken her to Europe and America, but she is always grateful for the free ballet training she received as a child in Cuba. Kitty Phetla grew up as a tomboy in a township in Soweto and did not know what ballet was until the age of nine. She was given the option of joining a ballet or karate group and thought she would not do the 'obvious' thing and went for ballet. Kitty danced with the Ballet Theatre Africans and is now a senior soloist and choreographer with the Joburg Ballet. Kitty is known for performing The Dying Swan, a piece made famous by legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. Kitty's version has an African twist though, instead of wearing a white tutu, pink tights and pointe shoes, she breaks with tradition to perform in an all-black costume to become The Black Dying Swan.(Photo: Lorena Feijoo (left) Kitty Phetla (right). Credit: Erik Tomasson, Susanne Holbaek)

Colombian Tatiana Calderón has gone from a teenage go-kart champion to a Formula 3 driver who reaches 280 kph at top speed. Her sights are set firmly on Formula 1. Tatiana is mentored by one of F1's most prominent women, the test driver Susie Wolff, and she describes how that's helped her handle other people's doubts about her abilities. Aggression on the track, training hard in the gym, and technical know-how are Tatiania's tactics for achieving her dream to get spotted by an F1 team. Ramona Karlsson is one of Sweden's most successful rally drivers, and is now a rising star in rallycross - where the races are shorter, the acceleration "explosive", and where there is wheel-to-wheel contact between the cars. Off the track she has had to overcome extreme shyness to approach sponsors and run her own team. She managed to do it, spurred on by her passion for racing cars and her determination to correct sexist attitudes towards female drivers. Tatiana Calderón. Picture credit: shoot-pro.de Ramona Karlsson. Picture credit: Glenn MattsingPresenter: Kim Chakanetsa

When Maria Luisa Catrambone helps to treat children who have serious burns and bloody injuries she says you need to control your facial expressions carefully and not show any sign of shock, so you don't scare them. This is something the teenager has learnt to do when going on rescue missions with the Migrant Offshore Aid Station - saving men, women and children from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, where thousands of migrants have lost their lives trying to reach Europe in the past year. Maria feels this work is her "calling" and worked hard to convince her mum and dad, who set up MOAS, to let her join them. Our second guest, who we've called 'Gardenia' for security reasons, works with the Syrian Civil Defence, a group of unarmed volunteers who rescue and treat victims of bomb blasts and sniper attacks. Gardenia has worked in a field hospital in Syria's southern city of Deraa for the past few years. She says if someone's lost a leg you have to reassure them "it's ok" to lose a limb, even though she knows it's not ok. Gardenia only lets herself get emotional about what she sees when she gets home "because you cannot cry in front of their eyes". Even before the conflict in Syria Gardenia knew she wanted to help save lives, so when she saw people dying in front of her she knew she had to help. Maria Luisa (lhs) credit: Migrant Offshore Aid Station Medic with blood stained hands credit: ANWAR AMRO / AFP / Getty Images

Naballah Chi is a 25-year-old fashion blogger, model and hijab stylist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her blog celebrates colourful clothes inspired by her Caribbean island home, but it also addresses the concerns and questions of her followers. Naballah has worn the hijab since kindergarten, but as an aspiring model she acknowledges that keeping the commitment can be a struggle and describes the guilt she felt when she removed it to take part in a beauty pageant. Hidaya Mohamad is a Javanese-Malaysian graduate student in Japan and feels she looks "like an alien" being the only hijabi on campus. Her philosophy is that if you're going to get noticed, you should wear good clothes and have fun. She is a student of foreign affairs and a fashionista with her own style blog, who says the hijab enables her to control who sees her body, "it liberates me .... but it does not define me." (Photo: Hidaya Mohamed and Naballah Chi. Credits: Ryuuzaki Julio and Luis Young)Presenter: Kim Chakanetsa

Cecilia Braekhus is considered one of the best female boxers, pound for pound, in the world. She's known in the ring as'The First Lady, because she was the first woman to be taken on by one of Europe's biggest boxing promoters and has held all of the major boxing belts simultaneously. It hasn't been easy for Cecilia to make it in her career: boxing was banned in her native Norway until 2014, so she had to move to Germany to succeed. But she was highly motivated and admits: "The people who do this are not ordinary people, we need the adrenalin, we need the action". Cecilia says she doesn't want to be seen as a sex symbol, and has "respectfully" turned down offers to pose for men's magazines. She wants fans to come to her matches to see her fight, not "look up under my skirt". And in the other corner we have Hanna Gabriels from Costa Rica. Hanna didn't start out as a boxer, she was a runner, but a back injury as a teenager put a stop to a promising athletic career. As a result she gained weight, which made her unhappy, and her dad, who was an amateur boxer, told her to try boxing to get back into shape. Hanna fell in love with the sport and has gone on to win several international victories. She says that Costa Rica is a "soccer country", so promoting herself outside the ring has been tough, but was amazed when she managed to get 15,000 people in a stadium to watch her fight. Picture: Cecilia Braekhus (Left), Hanna Gabriels (Right) Cecilia Braekhus picture credit: Trygve Indrelid

Kira Lea Dargin's parents met at church. Her mother is white from a Russian family who emigrated to Australia in the 1950s, and her father is Aboriginal Australian. Being "mixed" Kira says, means constantly having to explain how you came about or how your family manages to blend. Having come through some difficult times as a teenager Kira now happily identifies with both of her cultural backgrounds. As the director of 'Aboriginal Model Management Australia', her mission is to help broaden how Australian beauty is defined. Annina Chirade describes herself as Ghanaian Austrian. She is the founder and editor of Rooted In magazine. When she was growing up, between London and Vienna, people would often question whether she was related to her fair, straight-haired mother. After many years obsessively straightening her own "kinky, curly, Afro-" hair as a teenager, she found her own style - inspired by the confident styles of black female singers like Erykah Badu. Annina says that when you are 'mixed-race' people make assumptions about your identity and consider it to be "up for debate", but she is clear that "whiteness is not something I'm a part of." Picture: Kira Lea Dargin. Credit: Claire Mahjoub, SSH Annina Chirade. Credit: Adu Lalouschek

Emily Otali is a primatologist from Uganda. She's been told that she's the first black African woman to earn a PhD in the subject. On an early field trip she broke the rules and made direct eye-contact with a female chimpanzee, but that was the moment she 'fell in love' and found her vocation. Emily's job now is to observe a community of chimpanzees in Uganda's Kibale National Park and study their behaviour from dawn to sunset, and from birth until death. She says there's a deeper purpose to the work:- "we also study them to understand ourselves: where we have come from and where we're going in the future." Emily gave up her social life in Kampala for a comparatively lonely, but beautiful, forest life. She's also living apart from one of her children who is at school in the city. Despite some initial misgivings her parents and family now support her career choice and she tells others to be sure to choose a job they love because "if you don't like it, you'll never be happy."Lone Nielsen left behind a 10-year career as an air hostess and turned her habit of volunteering at a research project for orangutans in Borneo into her life's work. Lone is the founder of Nyaru Menteng Rescue Centre which now looks after around 600 orangutans who've been orphaned, displaced or mistreated. The aim of the Centre is to 'educate' the apes so they can return to the wild and start a new population. She describes how, for eight years, her own house on the Indonesian island was home to between 6 and 36 orphaned baby orangutans who needed through-the-night care either needing milk, their diapers changed, or comfort if their nightmares woke them. She says: "I became the substitute mother and I didn't get a lot of sleep at the time." In her time working with orangutans Lone says she's observed gender traits in their behaviour which are so similar to humans, "it's scary." She says male apes often "take the easy way out" and are less industrious than the females. Lone also talks about "the kindest soul I've ever met" - an orangutan called Alma whose death she describes as the hardest thing that ever happened to her. Presenter: Kim Chakanetsa Picture: Emily Otali with a chimpanzee (Left) Credit: Pamela Otali; and Lone Nielsen with an orangutan ((Right). BPI Björn Vaugn / Save the Orangutan

Leslea Newman has written more than sixty children's books. She says she can't remember a time when she didn't want to be a writer. As a teenager Leslea got her work published in magazines and she also worked as Alan Ginsberg's apprentice. When a friend told her she couldn't find any books for her daughter that portrayed a family like hers, with two lesbian parents, Leslea decided she needed to do something and wrote the children's picture book Heather has two Mommies. When it was published in 1989 it caused outrage "It started getting challenged and banned and I got called all kinds of terrible names". Twenty-five years later the book has been re-released, to a much kinder reception. Candy Gourlay grew up in the Philippines and fell in love with books as a child, but says "all the stories were of these pink-skinned children with fluffy pets", and she came to the conclusion that Filipinos were not "allowed to be in books". So her first novel was set in London with English characters and an agent said "why does your book look like that?", because it had no connection to Candy's experience. Candy took this advice on board and since then has created imaginary worlds with Filipino characters for her young readers. New technology has a role in Candy's work, she says that children have so many things "clamouring for their attention", so you've got to compete and embrace "their world". She does this with her novel Shine, which combines ghosts and the internet. Picture: Leslea Newman (Left) Credit: Mary Vazquez; Candy Gourlay (Right) Credit: Cindy Bajema/Sambat Trust