Taahra Ghazi & Hannah Bond, Co-CEOs, ActionAid UK
Taahra Ghazi and Hannah Bond are the first co-CEOs to appear on Causes — and, they'll happily admit, the arrangement that now defines ActionAid UK's leadership wasn't originally meant to last two years.
It began as a one-year stability measure after the previous CEO left for Oxfam. It kept getting extended, the board eventually made it permanent, and Taahra and Hannah now run one of the UK's best-known international NGOs together — deliberately rejecting the idea that leadership means one person at the top.
We talk about what it’s like responding to one of the worst humanitarian years on record. Taahra walks through ActionAid's new Transform Fund, built directly from what 300 women's rights organisations across 64 countries told the charity they actually needed after USAID and ODA cuts: not project funding, but trust — flexible, long-term, and fast enough to reach a grassroots group before a government crackdown does. Some of those organisations, Taahra explains, deliberately avoid official registration in their own countries to stay safer, which usually locks them out of INGO funding altogether. ActionAid fund them anyway.
Hannah and Taahra talk about the sector's failures on race — including the wave of solidarity statements that followed George Floyd's murder, which, as Hannah puts it, changed vocabulary but not practice. The episode also covers how, as a sector, it collectively took over a year to launch a Gaza Appeal, whilst a genocide was taking place and innocent Palestinians were being murdered.
ActionAid has a genuinely different approach to storytelling than most NGOs: the "Women by Women" project, where local women photographers shoot with no detailed brief, guided only by anti-racist storytelling principles designed to avoid the same tired images of suffering children and absent parents.
Their final piece of advice to every woman and girl facing poverty right now needs no elaboration: we're with you, and the system that tries to do you over can still be changed.
Into international development or humanitarian action?
Subscribe to receive new episodes with other leaders - straight to your inbox.
