Nashwa Babiker

Nashwa Babiker Isa Ahmed is a Sudanese sports broadcaster and the first female sports presenter to join Qatar Television.

She grew up in a six-member Sudanese family in Qatar as the eldest daughter of Babiker Isa, a journalist and political analyst at Al Raya newspaper. Her grandfather had founded Sudan’s first regional newspaper, and the family home contained hundreds of books. Her father guided her reading and encouraged both learning and sport. Although media had attracted her since childhood, she entered science at Qatar University after receiving an exceptional Amiri Diwan scholarship allocated through the Sudanese Embassy.

Her mother, who believed in her media talent despite fearing its demands, died from cancer in 1998. The loss brought a period of profound grief and depression. Qatar, where she had completed every stage of schooling and received the opportunity to study, became a second homeland to which she sought to return service through each professional achievement.

Her broadcasting career began in 1999, presenting variety programmes with director Hassan Al-Sai. In 2000 she moved into news, but a management change ended the use of collaborating staff and she was unexpectedly offered a place in sport. She initially viewed the offer as an indirect rejection because sports broadcasting was then almost entirely male, but decided to accept the challenge.

She was the only woman in Qatar Television’s Sports Department at the end of the 1990s and became the first female sports presenter to join the channel. Lakhdar Berish established its sports bulletins and trained a new group of broadcasters. Over the next twenty-one years, she presented specialist programmes and bulletins, reported from Doha for ‘Good Morning Arabs’ and worked for a period with Qatar Radio, where the dependence on voice rather than television pictures broadened her presentation skills.

Her father’s advice that an opportunity might come only once helped her overcome her early fear. Senior colleagues trained her intensively, and the newsroom became a second home whose team sometimes worked for weeks without a break. Her family also remained central: her husband gave her his American nationality and helped her balance broadcasting with raising their four children, Ahmed, Mohammed, Alya and Leen.

Her assignments included the first committee for Qatari women’s sport at the Gulf Championship in Sharjah. Because many families would not allow participants to be filmed, the team recorded training sessions to produce material that represented the event. She also joined Qatar’s media delegation to the Asian Games in Guangzhou, spending about twenty-seven days in China and filing daily reports while enduring an Eid away from her children.

Experience at Qatar Television made her an accomplished presenter and producer of reports and bulletins and led to cooperation with Al Arabiya on sports-news reports. The work began while she was still at university: she missed her graduation ceremony to cover the opening of the 2001 ExxonMobil men’s tennis tournament, and the ‘Good Morning Qatar’ team once delayed an episode by about half an hour so that she could sit a final science examination.

Sports journalism demanded detailed knowledge of unfamiliar rules, scoring systems and the pronunciation of international names. Conservative social expectations also made it difficult to secure interviews and filmed material from women, while entering basketball, handball and football venues that had long been male spaces initially left her feeling out of place. Her conviction that the coverage mattered enabled her to continue.

Qatar’s successful bid to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup intensified her enthusiasm for the country’s expanding sporting scene, including occasions that brought global figures such as Maradona and Pelé to Qatar and the opening of Aspire Academy. Yet long hours, travel and work during religious and social occasions continued to test the balance between profession and family.