REGISTER: https://ecos.univie.ac.at/lectures/ecos-guest-lecture-with-katharina-zellweger-april-20-2026
Among the earliest aid workers to go to North Korea when the country was struck by a devastating famine in the mid-1990s, Katharina Zellweger would make more than 75 trips to the DPRK, live in Pyongyang for 5 years, and visit almost all the country’s provinces, including the hardest-hit areas usually off-limits to foreigners. Her efforts, during the famine and in the two decades afterwards, saved the lives of thousands of people – most of them children. Zellweger will talk about her experience of working in North Korea and the impact on humanitarian aid, relief and development cooperation up to December 2019. Because of COVID-19, the North Korean government decided to close its borders in January 2020 and since that time, no access has been granted to NGO workers or UN agency staff, a real challenge assuming that people in North Korea, especially away from the capital Pyongyang, are still in need help. The question of whether, and how, to engage North Korea is one which the international community continues to grapple with.
Katharina Zellweger is a senior aid program manager with over 30 years of field experience in Hong Kong, China and North Korea. From 1978 to 2006, she worked in a senior post for the Catholic Agency Caritas, where she played a key role in pioneering Caritas’s involvement in China and North Korea, making dozens of trips to the DPRK. She was then based in Pyongyang for five years (2006-2011) as the North Korean country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), an office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For several years she also managed the Hong Kong-based KorAid Limited, an NGO she established in 2015 to focus on serving children in institutions and people with disabilities. Zellweger is affiliated with the Center of International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University in California. She holds a master’s degree in International Administration for the School of International Training, in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. She is also in the process of writing a book about her decades of experience working in North Korea.