Mevan Babakar

Mevan Babakar is a writer and social entrepreneur.

She worked at Google on provenance, information quality, combatting misinformation and support journalists. Together with DeepMind she helped launched BackStory, a tool to help explore the context of information online.

In 2023 Mevan was selected by the Obama Foundation as an Obama Leader for Europe.

Before Google, Mevan was deputy CEO of Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking charity. She founded Full Fact’s automated fact checking team which built AI tools to help scale the work of fact checkers. This won the Google AI Impact Challenge in 2018. The tools that were developed are now being used by fact checkers around the world. Mevan sat on the board of the International Fact Checking Network, which oversees 300 fact checking organisations worldwide.

Outside of Full Fact, Mevan served as a trustee for the UK for UNHCR, the UK arm of the UN refugee agency, and was Chair of the Board at Democracy Club which empowers voters and everyday democracy in the UK. At the last election this served 20 million voters key polling station and candidate data. At Bite the Ballot she launched the UK’s first ever National Voter Registration Day which has since registered millions of young people to vote.

Born in Baghdad to Kurdish parents her family fled Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds in the early 90s. Mevan was featured in the New York Times when she took a two-month sabbatical in 2019 to retrace the steps she took as a child refugee. She made headlines around the world when she found and thanked the aid worker who had helped her 24 years ago. He had left a big impression when he had generously helped her family and gifted her a bike.

In June 2024 this story was published by HarperCollins as a children’s book, The Bicycle. In February 2025 it was published in the UK by Farshore.

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