This year I spent my son’s sixth birthday protesting outside the Nigerian consulate in New York. Not the most conventional way to spend your child’s special day, I agree, but it was also the six-month anniversary of the abduction of the Chibok girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and it didn’t seem right that this important story had fallen off the news.

I am overwhelmed with sympathy for the parents – I don’t know what I would do or how I would be feeling if I were in their shoes. Eleven parents have since died and several are in hospital suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of this awful experience.

As for the girls, according to Human Rights Watch, many kidnapped by Boko Haram have been beaten, raped, made to kill and subjected to other unspeakable atrocities. And as if Nigerians have not suffered enough, now comes news of a bomb in a school in Yobe in the north-east of the country, detonated during the school’s assembly and killing at least 47 people and injuring scores of others. Boko Haram is again the suspect. As a mother, this cruel bombing leaves me heartbroken about the pain the parents must be feeling. But as someone with a huge platform to reach people it makes me ask, how can I stand by and just watch that happen?

It’s not enough for me to tweet and go on news shows talking about my work. I want to be in the thick of it, to draw attention to things I believe are wrong. I hope my involvement can send a strong message that the global community has not forgotten about the Nigerian girls.

Over the summer, a friend asked me the existential question, why are you here? From the process of asking others the same question I realised that if you can define why you are here, then you have discovered your purpose. I went off and wrote the song We Are Here. It resonates with the way many of us feel at the moment: the world is out of balance and terrible brutality is coming at us all the time in our news feeds. That was followed by the idea of galvanising fans of my music into a social movement which could become part of a 21st-century peace initiative.

My awareness of social injustice became more apparent after I became a mother, and now I am pregnant with my second child. A woman becomes a lioness when she sees her unborn child’s future juxtaposed with the horrors of the world. On the one hand things are surprisingly positive, my generation and the one after mine want to change things. We see no international borders because of the internet, we are more global and more savvy.

On the other hand there appears to be more violence and a refusal to accept we are all equal and deserve the same rights and privileges. Why, for example, is there such an obscene economic gap whereby 85 people have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the global population? Surely it is time to re-evaluate our economic priorities? If we can bail out Wall Street why can’t we bail out the poor? Drop their debts and give them hope.

It is not just people in Nigeria, Sudan or Gaza who have been failed by their governments. For those of us who live in the US, social and racial injustice is glaringly obvious from the incarceration rate of people of colour and the huge amounts of money being pumped into the prison system. This is a country that has a huge legacy of racial inequality and brutality. And the scars run especially deep for those who know very well that at a certain point in their history their family were slaves. Then, there is the issue of gun safety. In the US, 86 people die from guns each day. I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, and saw a lot of mental illness, which I think also raised my concern about healthcare.

It is up to us to realise that if we put equality and human rights at the core of our value system, then change is possible. But we need to know what steps to take to really effect the change we believe in. Education, for example, is a vital opportunity for the poor – in Nigeria and elsewhere – and we must fight for it.

I know critics will say that people like me should stick to making records. But musicians are voters too. We are artists and we are human, alive to what is going on around us. We seem to be able to connect to millions of people who have either lost faith in the system or who need to feel a part of a community. Music has an uncanny way of getting to people’s emotions. And when we listen to music it is as if the consciousness changes around us. I intend to keep on speaking out, as do a number of my peers. We feel it is our duty to use our fame for something bigger than empty things.