Birgit Weyss

Birgit is a lawyer by training with a master’s degree in human rights and democratisation and has more than 18 years of work experience in international development cooperation and public policy. Her professional experience spans UN agencies, NGOs and governments mostly in Southern Africa, where she lived for over 10 years. In Eswatini, she worked for UNDP leading the governance unit with a strong focus on women’s rights. From there she moved to Mozambique where she mostly worked for UNICEF on multidimensional child poverty and contributed to the geographic targeting strategy of the UN Development Assistance Framework for Mozambique. Her next assignment led her to South Africa, where she worked on analysing public expenditure on the health and education sector for various organizations including UNICEF and the Equal Education Law Centre. In 2019, Birgit joined the Austrian Development Agency to oversee bilateral programmes in Bhutan and Mozambique as well as regional programmes in Southern Africa. She recently took on the role of coordinating ADA’s regional programme in Africa, which as an annual budget of over EUR 15 million.