Emily Hobhouse (April 9, 1860—June 8, 1926) was a British welfare campaigner who is primarily remembered for shedding light on the abhorent conditions inside the British concentration camps built during the Second Boer War.

Born in Liskeard, Cornwall, she was the daughter of an Anglican rector. Her mother died when she was 20, and she spent the next fourteen years looking after her father who was in poor health. When her father died in 1895 she went to Minnesota to perform welfare work amongst Cornish mineworkers living there, the trip having been organised by the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury. There she became engaged to John Carr Jackson and the couple bought a ranch in Mexico but this did not prosper and the engagement was broken off. She returned to England in 1898. When the Second Boer War broke out in October 1899, a Liberal MP, Leonard Courtney, invited her to become secretary of the women's branch of the South African Conciliation Committee of which he was president.

She set up the South African Women and Children’s Distress Fund and soon set off to South Africa to supervise the distribution of the fund, arriving in Cape Town on the 27 December 1900. When she left England, she only knew about the concentration camp at Port Elizabeth, but on arrival found out about the many other camps.

She had a letter of introduction to the Cape Colony governor, Alfred Milner from her aunt, the widow of the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office under Sir Robert Peel and who knew Milner. From him she obtained the use of two railway trucks, subject to the army commander, Lord Kitchener's, approval. She received Kitchener's permission two weeks later, although it only allowed her to travel as far as Bloemfontein and take one truck of supplies for the camps, about 12 tons.

She arrived at the camp at Bloemfontein on 24 January 1901 and was shocked by the conditions she encountered: "They went to sleep without any provision having been made for them and without anything to eat or to drink. I saw crowds of them along railway lines in bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain - hungry, sick, dying and dead." She also visited camps at Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River.

When she returned to England she received fierce opposition from the British government and much of the media but eventually succeeded in obtaining more funding to help the victims of the war. The government eventually agreed to set up the Fawcett Commission to investigate her claims, under Millicent Fawcett, which corroborated her account of conditions.

She returned to Cape Town in October 1901 but was not permitted to land and deported five days after arriving. She then went to France where she wrote a book on the war. She visited South Africa in 1903 and returned again in 1905 to set up schools to teach young women spinning and weaving. However ill health, from which she never recovered, forced her to return to England in 1908.

Hobhouse was an avid opponent of the First World War and protested vigorously against it. She became an honourary citizen of South Africa for her humanitarian work there. Hobhouse died in London in 1926 and her ashes are interned in a niche in the Women’s Memorial at Bloemfontein. The southernmost town in Eastern Free State is named Hobhouse after her.