After many months of preparation and some weeks of waiting for a flight to Ho Chi Minh City, our colleague Dr. Hildegard Hagemann finally left for Vietnam in early December to monitor the work of Kolping Vietnam and other Kolping organizations in Asia for a period of three years. Hildegard Hagemann has been closely connected with the work of KOLPING INTERNATIONAL because of a strong collaboration in different areas in the past few years.
Working for the German Commission for Justice and Peace with a special emphasis on development, Dr. Hagemann dealt with many topics that are also extremely relevant to KOLPING INTERNATIONAL, such as the European Union’s development policy, the development and implementation of Agenda 2030 and many other sustainability topics. One major task was also to represent KOLPING INTERNATIONAL and the values of Catholic social teaching every year at the ILO International Labour Conference.
She has always been strongly committed to empowering civil society to stand up for policies that help reduce poverty and enable people to fight for their economic, social and cultural human rights. Studying in the 1980s in Bonn, Malaysia and Gießen, she graduated and received a doctorate in agricultural sciences. In Malaysia she met her later husband and after they had started a family, they both worked as development experts in Papua New Guinea in the 1990s. They have two adult sons. Dr. Hagemann lived in Herne until her departure for Vietnam.
We are pleased and grateful to welcome Hildegard Hagemann as a colleague who will do a committed and active job in advising and supporting Kolping work in Asia. We wish her and her colleagues in Vietnam and in the other Kolping organizations in Asia good luck and God’s blessing.
