Anita Rani

About Anita

Anita Rani has been supporting UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency since 2017, and was announced as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador in March 2021.

Anita has consistently used her voice to tell refugee stories. As a leading presenter for the BBC’s flagship show Countryfile, she has told the stories of refugees rebuilding their lives in the UK. She presented a three-part documentary ‘The Refugee Camp: Our Desert Home’, which - produced with help from UNHCR - shone a light on life in Za’atari camp in Jordan. She also co-produced BBC One’s two-part series 'My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947'.

Anita has hosted UNHCR’s Nansen Refugee Award in Geneva, as well as the Women on the Move Awards, celebrating the vital contributions that refugee and migrant women make to their local communities in the UK. In October 2019, she chaired a panel discussion between Goodwill Ambassador Cate Blanchett and activist Maha Mamo at the High-Level Segment on Statelessness in Geneva, discussing UNHCR’s #IBelong campaign to end statelessness by 2024.

Field visits

As part of Anita’s support for the 2019 Nansen awards, Anita travelled to Kyrgyzstan to meet Nansen Award winner Azizbek Ashurov with UNHCR. She rode on horseback through the mountains, following the path human rights lawyer Ashurov would have taken during his mission to provide stateless Kyrgyzstanis with documentation and an identity.