Claus Folden

Claus Folden has more than 30 years of experience in migration, asylum, emergencies and international cooperation both at political, policy, strategic and operational levels, including leading field operations and implementing a vast number of policy dialogues and capacity building programmes. His drive to link the political discourse to tangible programmatic interventions has proved to be key in delivering sustainable solutions for all interlocutors.

Claus has been actively involved in developing EU migration policies for many years, and the SDGs, GCM and GCR are all processes he was a part of formulating.

In recent years he has fulfilled an advisory role in for example supporting governments and other stakeholders in addressing the refugee flows from Ukraine through an integrated and data driven approach; for IOM Iraq the assignment consisted of assessment, analysis, developing Migration Data Strategy, giving strategic advice and capacity development to Iraqi officials. For the MENA region he mapped existing return and readmission agreements, arrangements and other cooperation platforms of MENA countries and delivered a set of recommendations on how better instrumentalise existing bilateral and multilateral mechanism and on how to promote possible new dialogues.

Examples of recent projects:

·  Project Manager - Multiple framework contract on Impact Assessments, Evaluations and Studies on Migration for DG HOME (2024 - )

·  Expert on Migration - Evaluation of the FRONTEX Standing Corps deployment management system and the business aspects of its implementation. Frontex is the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, is supporting EU Member States in managing the external borders of the European Union (2026)