Zeinab Badawi

Zeinab Badawi is a Sudanese-British journalist and broadcaster who has spent more than three decades at the BBC and other British broadcasters, presenting flagship news and current-affairs programs and chairing international media organizations. She was born on April 4, 1959, in Omdurman, Sudan, into a prominent intellectual family — her father, Mohamed-Khair Ahmed El-Badawi, was the editor of one of Sudan's first independent newspapers — and her family moved to Britain when she was a young child after her father took up postgraduate studies in London.

Her education combined St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read philosophy, politics, and economics, with a master's degree in anthropology and African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She entered television in the early 1980s with Yorkshire Television and ITN, working as a reporter and presenter, before moving to the BBC in the late 1990s.

Her main BBC presenting roles have included World News Today on the BBC News channel and BBC World, HARDtalk following the departure of Stephen Sackur, and a long run of interview-led programs on African affairs. She co-presented Channel 4 News from 1989 to 1998 with Jon Snow during the program's expansion years and has been a regular interviewer of African heads of state and senior figures in international institutions.

Her work on African history outside daily news produced the 2017 BBC television series The History of Africa and the 2024 book An African History of Africa, drawing on her interviews with historians and on-location filming in more than thirty African countries. She served as president of SOAS University of London from 2014 to 2021 and chair of the Royal African Society, and she sat on the boards of the BBC's commercial and editorial committees and of UNESCO advisory groups.

Her name Zeinab is the English spelling she uses for the Arabic name Zaynab, borne by the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and one of the most-common female names across the Arabic-speaking world. She has used the spelling Zeinab on air and in print throughout her broadcasting career.