Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim was born between 1932 and 1933 in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Her grandfather was a headmaster at the first Sudanese School for men and the Imam at the neighborhood mosque. Her father was a teacher and her mother was among the first generation of girls who attended school. Her passion for activism started early, when she was studying at Omudurman Girls’ Secondary School, where she create a wall newspaper called Elra’edda, which translate to Pioneer Girls. She also conducted the first women’s strike in Sudan, protesting her school administration’s decision to cancel science classes and replace them with family science classes. Her strike was successful. In 1947, Fatima founded the Intellectual Women’s Association and in 1952 she founded the Sudanese Women’s Union, a women’s rights organization that has become one of the largest post-independence women’s rights organizations in Africa. She served on the executive committee with Fatima Talib and Khalida Zahir and together they developed an agenda that focused on the right to vote, women’s suffrage, and the right of women to act as representatives in all legislative, political, and administrative corporations. In the years following the founding of these organizations, Fatima also joined the Sudanese Communist Party and in 1956, she became the president of the Women’s Union in the party. In 1955, she became a chief editor of Sawat al-Maraa or Woman’s Voice Magazine, a magazine that later contributed to the overthrow of the Ibrahim Abboud regime. Fatima because the first Sudanese women deputy in 1965, when she was elected to parliament. She remained in politics for many years until the 1970s, when she was placed under house arrest during Jaafar Muhammed al-Nemieri’s regime. In 1990, she left Sudan, joining the opposition in exile and serving as the President of the Sudanese Women’s Union and the Women’ International Democratic Federation. In 2005, Fatima returned to Sudan serving as a deputy of the SCP before retiring from politics in 2011.