Helping Orphans was established and is led by Hanan Habibzai, with its headquarters in the UK. An Afghan-British journalist Hanan Habibzai left Afghanistan in 2008. He earned his master’s degree in Global Journalism from Coventry University in the UK in 2011. Mr Habibzai is now a doctoral fellow in educational studies and educational leadership at Unicaf. Over the course of more than a decade, he covered Afghanistan for the BBC and Reuters (2002 to 2009). Notably, he covered Afghanistan from 2001 for international media outlets when invaded by the US-led foreign military.
He also served as a London-based journalist for Radio Azadi from 2009 to 2013. In the early years of his life, he was forced to flee to Pakistan because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Years later, he was forced to flee again to the United Kingdom because of the invasion led by the United States.
In his capacity as a journalist, he travelled across Afghanistan and saw first-hand the pervasive starvation and suffering of the Afghan people, particularly women and children.
In 2016, Hanan Habibzai founded Helping Orphans, a registered UK charity. He voluntarily managed and directed the organisation, knowing that serving humanity was his passion. His charity provides sustainable development projects to the families of orphans and vulnerable people in Afghanistan, and he looks forward to becoming self-reliant. “There is no doubt that having empathy for others provides us with strong motivation to carry out charitable deeds. We take care to always remember the overarching objective of making the world a better place and bringing about genuine change”, Mr Habibzai said.
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