Valeska Onken is a international development cooperation professional working at GIZ and a dual-career PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University
Valeska Onken started her career with UNDP, GTZ and later IOM in East Africa, looking at forced migration, return and reintegration, diaspora engagement and regional mixed migration, including implementation work in South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya. Given her academic background, she then honed in on migration policy advice to partner governments including Rwanda, but also in the Western Balkans, Georgia, Vietnam and Indonesia including topics such as diaspora policies, labour migration agreements, incl. protection of migrant workers, integrated border management, protection of victims of trafficking and smuggled migrants. As a senior conceptual planning officer for GIZ, Valeska helped develop the portfolio on migration governance based on a human rights approach and a keen eye on do-no-harm principles which influenced the German and EU funded programmes she designed for the African Union, Niger and in the East and Horn of Africa region. For the past four years, Valeska worked as a GIZ programme manager in a senior leadership position in South Africa, managing a bilateral multi-stakeholder anti-corruption programme. Thematically this has particularly exposed her to the phenomenon of sexual corruption, especially in immigration and border management. Valeska she seeks to combine her academic and professional expertise in her PHD research, which will focus on the unintended consequences of EU-Africa migration cooperation on migration governance in Africa post-2015.