Mevan, pronounced “me” + “van”, is a social entrepreneur, and writer. She is the News and Information Credibility Lead at Google, working to tackle misinformation globally, and to support journalists.
Mevan was previously Interim CEO at Democracy Club which empowers voters and everyday democracy in the UK and deputy CEO of Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking charity where she worked on the problems mis/disinformation for seven years.
She founded Full Fact’s automated fact checking team which built technologies to help scale the work of fact checkers around the world. This work went on to win the Google AI Impact Challenge. Mevan also sat on the board of the International Fact Checking Network, which oversees 300 fact checking organisations worldwide.
Before Full Fact, Mevan launched the UK’s first ever National Voter Registration Day which has since registered millions of young people to vote. In 2020 Mevan launched Level Up, a voluntary mentoring program that connects UK tech professionals with early career developers in Iraq and Syria. She has been a digital adviser to the Big Lottery Foundation, and is a founding organiser of Citizen Beta, a community of 600+ civic technologists in the UK.
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 when she was a child.
Mevan now serves as trustee for the UK for UNHCR, the UK arm of the UN refugee agency, which helps protect refugees around the world.
Mevan Babakar 