Staff
Dr Birgit Kemmerling
Professional Career
Birgit has a PhD in human geography and several years of professional experience in humanitarian aid. For the past fifteen years, she has been researching and working on various countries in the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa, mainly on food (in)security and sustainable resource management.
She joined bicc in November 2019 as a senior researcher for a project on sustainable transformation processes in rural Morocco (I-WALAMAR). For three years, she explored the socio-economic sustainability and potential risks of introducing new technologies and agricultural practices that aim for introducing a circular economy in the olive oil industry in Meknès, Morocco. The project brough her back to Morocco after more than a decade, where she conducted research for her Master thesis on the potentials for a “sustainable range management of a pastoral-nomadic group in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco”. After that, she lived and conducted research in Egypt for several years for her PhD on the governance of water in Egypt’s agricultural sector and its impact on socio-spaces, with a focus on the role of the international development cooperation.
She has also worked in the humanitarian department at Caritas Germany in Freiburg for more than three years, where she coordinated emergency and transitional aid projects in South Sudan and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Building on this practical experience, She is currently part of a research project at BICC on how the links between humanitarian assistance, development cooperation and peacebuilding (HDP nexus) can be improved. For this project, she conducts research in three localities in South Sudan. Besides that, she is working on the links between current food crises and violent conflict.