At Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, Lena Kainz works as a desk officer in the unit on West- and Central Africa, where she covers Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Cabo Verde as well as ECOWAS and maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea. Previously, Ms. Kainz focused on migration and displacement issues in her work at the Migration Policy Institute Europe in Brussels, UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Arab States in Amman, and the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Rabat. Ms. Kainz holds a master’s degree in refugee and forced migration studies, with distinction, from the University of Oxford, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Scandinavian Studies and Political Science, summa cum laude, from Humboldt University Berlin. Outside of the policy sphere, she enjoys learning more about space travel and the search for exoplanets.