Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian

Gery Murphy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people

about the big ideas in their lives and the events that have helped shape them.

My guest this week is the chief executive of the

charity action aid which focuses on helping women and girls around the world.

Halima Begum grew up in London's East End on Brick Lane. She has been a human rights campaigner and an advocate.

She's taken the government to court during COVID and she's a regular opinion giver on programs like question time and

across the media it's nice to have you here.

Really nice to be here Kristen thank you.

I want to talk to you about Action Aid and everything you do as a campaigner in due course, but let's begin with your own story.

Your origins of Bangladeshi.

When did your parents come here?

Well, my father actually came here in the middle of the 1950s,

so he was a kind of Asian wind rush,

but my mother and I came to join him as a family in the mid-1970s.

So you were born in Bangladesh?

In Bangladesh, that's right.

So what were your early years? My earliest memory of life is actually in the late 1970s in the East End of London in Peticoat Lane.

And we were living in a flat that was dilapidated and probably not fit for purpose and it was marked by the then GLC for demolition.

So my earliest memory was living in those flats and my father and other men and women like him desperately seeking for a home for their new families in the East End of London.

And so we squatted in our first real home just off a brick lane in Quaker Street which still stands today and I'm now

living in it but we squatted in our first home.

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