Gritt Richter

Gritt Richter serves as the Senior Program Officer for East and Southeast Asia in EMpower’s Hong Kong office. She develops and manages grantee partnerships in China, including Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, and provides partners with technical capacity strengthening.

Gritt brings over 20 years of professional experience in international development cooperation focused on women’s and young people’s empowerment. Her technical expertise includes amongst others positive youth development as well as the design of strong programs in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET). Gritt has worked extensively with community-based organizations in a variety of contexts in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

She was already part of the EMpower team and based in Hong Kong from 2015 to 2018. Before joining EMpower again in 2021, Gritt worked as a freelance consultant with expertise in strategy, organizational capacity development, mentoring and coaching of CSO leaders, collaborative project design, monitoring and evaluation and social anthropology in the field of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C).

Her prior experience spans from Plan International France, having closely worked as Head of Programs with country programs on different continents leading successful program design while ensuring high technical quality, to the German development agency GIZ, for which she also spent three years as counselor on FGM/C in Mali, West Africa, to TERRE DES FEMMES, during which the NGO developed under her leadership to one of the most influent actors in the field of FGM/C in Germany.

Gritt holds a diploma in Business Management from universities in Germany and France as well as a Master’s Degree in International Humanitarian Assistance from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany and the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. She speaks fluent German, French, English and a little Spanish.