Fatemeh Hajiali - Written evidence (MUL0002)
Response to Question 13: Core Areas of UK Policy Demanding Multilateral Solutions
With specific reference to Question 3: The Role of Non-State Actors
Submitted by:Fatemeh Hajiali
Credentials: Independent Researcher | GMBPsS | AMRSPH | Former Midwife
Areas of expertise:Public health, early childhood development, maternal wellbeing, educational equity, migrant family experience
Introduction
This submission draws on two distinct but complementary sources of evidence: my professional background as a former midwife and independent researcher in public health and child development, and my lived experience as a migrant mother in the United Kingdom.
I write in response to Question 3, which asks about the role of non-state actors — including NGOs, multinational corporations, and technology companies — in shaping multilateralism. I argue that these actors play a decisive but insufficiently scrutinised role in determining whether international frameworks translate into meaningful support for vulnerable populations, particularly migrant women, children, and families navigating systems that were not designed with them in mind.
The Role of NGOs and Charities: Evidence from the Ground
During my career as a midwife in Iran, I volunteered regularly with charitable organisations providing free reproductive health consultations to women who could not afford private care. This experience gave me a direct understanding of how non-state actors fill the gaps left by state systems — and how dependent vulnerable populations become on those actors when formal institutions fail to reach them.
Since arriving in the United Kingdom, I have had the opportunity to speak informally with many migrant mothers, particularly within the Iranian community in the London boroughs of Barnet and Finchley. Their accounts reveal a consistent pattern. The challenges they faced were not primarily legal or bureaucratic in nature. They were human: language barriers that made navigating the NHS feel impossible without the help of a translator or a trusted community member; profound loneliness, particularly in the early months before community connections were established; family breakdown, including divorce and infidelity, whose emotional consequences were compounded by social isolation and lack of culturally appropriate support; and in some cases, involvement with social services that led families to withdraw entirely from community life, cutting off relationships that might otherwise have provided informal support.
In several instances, the families I spoke with had not sought help from statutory services precisely because they did not trust them — or did not know they existed. It was NGOs, community organisations, and informal migrant networks that provided the first point of contact. These non-state actors were not supplementing the system. They were, in practice, the system.
This matters for multilateralism because the UK's international commitments — to child wellbeing, maternal health, gender equality, and migrant integration — are only as meaningful as the domestic infrastructure that implements them. When that infrastructure depends on underfunded charities and informal community networks, the gap between international commitment and lived reality becomes very wide indeed.
Technology Companies as Non-State Actors: The Digital Exclusion Dimension
Multinational technology companies represent a second category of non-state actor whose influence on vulnerable populations is profound and largely unregulated at the international level.
As a migrant mother, I experienced first-hand how the digitisation of public services creates new forms of exclusion. Upon arriving in the UK, I discovered that schools, healthcare providers, local councils, and benefits systems had moved significant portions of their services online. Payment platforms, parent communication apps, appointment booking portals, and email-based correspondence replaced the face-to-face and telephone contact I had been accustomed to. For months, I struggled to navigate these systems — not because I lacked education or capability, but because the digital infrastructure of public life in this country had been built around a set of assumptions about users that did not include people like me.
The migrant mothers I spoke with described similar experiences. Many relied on their children, or on community volunteers, to help them understand digital communications from schools and health services. Several had missed important appointments or notifications because they did not understand the platforms through which information was being sent.
This is not an incidental problem. It is a structural one. Multinational technology companies whose platforms are now embedded in the delivery of public services — Google Classroom, NHS digital tools, Universal Credit's online portal — operate across national borders and are subject to minimal internationally coordinated oversight with respect to accessibility, language inclusion, or equitable design. The result is that digital transformation, which promises efficiency and inclusion, frequently deepens existing inequalities for the most vulnerable groups.
Effective multilateral engagement must therefore include technology companies within its scope. International frameworks should establish common standards for digital accessibility in public services, require meaningful alternatives for those who cannot engage digitally, and ensure that the design of technology serving public functions is tested against the needs of diverse and marginalised populations — not only the digitally confident majority.
Implications for UK Multilateral Policy
The UK is well positioned to lead on these issues. It has strong research institutions, a world-respected health system, and a significant diaspora population whose experiences represent an important source of evidence about what multilateral commitments look like in practice.
I would respectfully suggest that the Committee consider the following in its report:
First, that non-state actors — particularly NGOs serving migrant and vulnerable communities — should be formally recognised as implementation partners in the UK's multilateral commitments, and supported accordingly through sustained funding rather than short-term grants.
Second, that technology companies operating in the delivery of public services should be subject to internationally coordinated standards of accessibility and inclusion, developed through multilateral frameworks and enforced domestically.
Third, that the voices of those most affected by gaps in multilateral implementation — migrant women, families navigating complex systems, communities experiencing digital exclusion — should be actively sought in the development of UK international policy, not only in its evaluation.
Conclusion
Multilateralism is most meaningful when its commitments reach the people who need them most. In my experience as both a practitioner and a migrant, the distance between international agreement and individual lived reality is often bridged — or left unbridged — by non-state actors: the charity that offers a translator, the community network that names a social worker, the technology platform that sends a critical message in a language and format a mother cannot understand.
The UK's engagement with the multilateral system should take seriously the role these actors play, and the responsibilities they carry. Doing so would strengthen not only the coherence of UK foreign policy, but its impact on the lives of the most vulnerable people it is intended to serve.
19 June 2026