
Barbara Rijks comes on board at PEM as Associate Senior Consultant
Barbara is a consultant with 30 years of international development cooperation experience. She started her career in Amsterdam, working with Amnesty International’s Department of Refugees, and spent most of her early career in Southern Africa, working for the UN Population Fund, the UN Refugee Agency, and the UN Migration Agency (IOM). Most of her humanitarian work took place for IOM in Liberia and Iraq, where she worked for four years as Head of Office in Erbil and Deputy Chief Mission in Baghdad. In this role, she mobilized multi-year, flexible donor funding and negotiated partnerships supporting humanitarian assistance and the resettlement of Yezidis. She later moved to Niamey (Niger) as IOM’s Chief of Mission, where she led the emergency response to the mass arrival of transit migrants, coordinating life-saving assistance and voluntary humanitarian returns with national and local authorities. Barbara brings extensive expertise in civil society organisations, migration dynamics, durable solutions


