Anna Sophie Herken joins the GIZ Management Board

On 15 August, Anna Sophie Herken took up her position as a Managing Director of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. Fellow managing directors Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel and Ingrid-Gabriela Hoven are pleased that she has joined the team: ‘With her wealth of international management experience and her broad perspective, Anna Sophie Herken will be a real asset to our Management Board team and the company as a whole. We are very much looking forward to working with her and welcoming her to the company.’

‘Dedication and commitment, openness, and professional and international diversity are the hallmarks of GIZ and determine its success,’ said Anna Sophie Herken as she took up her post. ‘I am glad to be able to contribute my experience from my previous positions in the private sector, development cooperation and the German Government to the work of GIZ’s Management Board. I firmly believe that development cooperation and international cooperation should be strengthened worldwide, particularly in view of the crises we currently face.’

Herken has many years of international experience as a manager in the private sector, and in the fields of development cooperation and academia. Before joining GIZ, she was Business Division Head at Allianz Asset Management GmbH as well as a Member of the Board of Allianz Life in the USA and Chair of the Board of the Allianz Foundation for North America. Prior to that, she was Chief Financial Officer at HPC (Hasso Plattner Capital) Germany GmbH and Managing Director of the Hertie School of Governance GmbH in Berlin. Herken has also worked for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, as well as for the World Bank in Washington, D.C. on projects in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, and the German Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology (later Labour) in Berlin.