Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is currently a senior official and President of France Terre d’Asile, one of France’s leading organisations for the reception, support and housing of asylum seekers. She is known as a highly committed political figure, NGO leader and author.
She served as a local elected official for ten years before becoming a minister for five years, as France’s Minister for Women’s Rights from 2012 to 2014 and later Minister of National Education, Higher Education and Research from 2014 to 2017.
As an NGO leader, she also headed the ONE Campaign France for several years, fighting against extreme poverty and preventable diseases in the low-income countries.
In the field of education, she created the ‘Gender Equality and Public Policy’ programme at Sciences Po Paris. As an author, she has published several books, with her most recent works focusing on education (The School Ghetto: Truly Ending Separatism, Le Seuil, 2024), development policies for poverty alleviation (Target 2030: A World Without Extreme Poverty, Flammarion, 2021), the defence of the right to asylum (Refugees, What They Are Not Telling You, Stock, 2025) and women’s rights (The Society of the Vulnerable: Feminist Lessons from a Crisis, Gallimard, 2020). Her latest publication, Digital Detox (Tallandier, 2026), calls for stronger regulation of social media platforms and AI. Her biography, Life Has More Imagination Than You (Grasset, 2017), was published in 2017.
