Halima Begum

Halima Begum is chief executive of ActionAid UK. She has worked the Department for International Development, the British Council and the Runnymede Trust. Early life and education Begum was born in Sylhet, Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Liberation War. Her parents were working-class migrants who experienced homelessness during Begum's early childhood in London. Due to discriminatory restrictions on Commonwealth British citizens accessing public services including housing, the family joined the British-Bangladeshi squatter movement and lived in a series of derelict buildings in the East End of London, one condemned for demolition as a result of bomb damage caused by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. With her parents eventually offered permanent public housing in the late 1970s, Begum was raised on Brick Lane in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. She attended Thomas Buxton Primary School and Central Foundation Girls School. As a teenager, Begum co-founded Women Unite Against Racism to combat the rising incidence of racial discrimination and Islamophobia in East London, including Millwall and the Isle of Dogs. In the early 1990s, she was active in the fight against the extreme rightwing National Front and Derek Beackon, the party's first elected councillor; she was physically assaulted several times. She took her undergraduate degree in Government and History, and her master's degree in International Relations at the London School of Economics, before completing her PhD at Queen Mary University of London. Disability As a young child Begum had a rare and debilitating medical condition that led to the surgical removal of her left eye. In an episode of the BBC World Service series Emotional Baggage, dedicated to her life and experiences of migration, Begum recounted to host Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones how the NHS initially refused to offer her parents access to treatment for their child, despite the family's status as British citizens. At the time, this was explained by a misplaced but relatively widespread hesitancy to allow immigrant British citizens from the Commonwealth access to public services, like healthcare, as a result of ostensibly restrictive reforms in the law emanating from the Immigration Act 1971 and other legislation. Begum described to the BBC how her father, a textile factory worker, felt he had no choice left but to hand custody of his two-year-old daughter to the Imam of Brick Lane Mosque.