Jenny Iao-Jörgensen is a part-time Senior Programme Officer at RWI’s European Office in Lund. She primarily manages the RIGHTSCITIES project (2024-2026), co-funded by the EU Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme. The project aims to strengthen cities’ institutional capacities to implement the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It will develop and test context-relevant tools, methods, resources, and procedures to integrate human rights into everyday city governance, guided by the Fundamental Rights Agency’s Framework for Human Rights Cities. Project partners include Lund municipality and the cities of Sopot, Vienna, Gdańsk, and Utrecht, supported by the RWI, the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights, and the Utrecht University.

With over 20 years of global experience in humanitarian aid and international development, Jenny specializes in institutional and organizational analysis, project management, capacity development, Results-Based Management (RBM), and Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E). She also consults for international organizations, facilitating theory of change workshops, conducting organizational capacity assessments, and leading mid-term, final, and process evaluations. Her has supported planning, M&E, learning and reporting for a wide range of disaster response, recovery, and resilience-building initiatives globally for organisations like the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Swedish Red Cross, UNDP, UN Women and other Swedish government authorities. From 2014 to 2018, she held various management and leadership roles at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) in the EU crisis management innovation project, DRIVER, involving 36 cross-sector partners from 15 European countries from the onset.

From 1999 to 2000, during the political transition, Jenny worked with the ICRC and the Chinese and Hong Kong Red Cross on International Humanitarian Law (IHL) training activities, and helped establishing an IHL promotion center in her hometown, Macau—a former Portuguese colony and now a special administrative region of China. Between 2016 and 2024, she served as a process evaluator for MSB’s International Training Programme for Disaster Risk Management programe in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal and the Philippines,  the UNDP-Swedish Environmental Protection Agency’s global environmental governance project, The latter specifically focused on rules-based and rights-based approaches to natural resource management in the mining sector in Colombia, Kenya, Mongolia, and Mozambique. Jenny also chaired the board of the SULF Doctoral Candidate Association (the Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers), advocating for PhD students’ rights impacted by COVID-19 and changes in Swedish migration law. These experiences, combined with her commitment to social transformation, deepened her interest in RWI’s research, education, and capacity development efforts to promote human rights and humanitarian law.

Jenny identifies herself as a “pracademic”—a professional integrating academic research with practical application—and is committed to bridging theoretical and practical knowledge to address “wicked problems” in multi-actor systems. She holds a PhD in Systems Safety and an MSc in International Development and Management from Lund University, where she also researches and teaches in two master’s programs: LUMID (Lund University Master’s in International Development and Management) in the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation Master’s program in the Faculty of Engineering. She also teaches undergraduate students in Blekinge Institute of Technology leadership and sustainability course. Her research on projectified organizational systems behavior and practices has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Project Management, Public Administration and Development, Frontiers in Climate, and Progress in Disaster Science. In 2024, she was certified in urban resilience by the International Urban Resilience Academy, under the UNESCO Chair on Urban Resilience at the University of Southern Denmark.