Founder & CEO, Pilegaard Consulting
Lisbeth Pilegaard is the founder and CEO of Pilegaard Consulting – providing technical, managerial and strategic guidance on foreign affairs often in conflict settings and fragile states. Pilegaard has over 20 years of civil society experience as manager of several humanitarian organisations and programmes based in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, Caucasus and the Middle East.
Lisbeth Pilegaard is as Civil Society Expert elected to the Board of Directors and the Vice-chair of the Executive Committee of the Brussels based European Endowment for Democracy rendering support to democratic civic activities in EU neighbourhood countries and beyond.
During 2015, Lisbeth Pilegaard was seconded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a Humanitarian Affairs Expert Adviser to support the UN High Level Panel for Humanitarian Financing. The Secretary-General of the United Nations created a High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing to address the global humanitarian crises, co-chaired by the Vice-President of the European Commission, Kristalina Georgieva and HRH Nazrin Shah, Sultan of Perak, Malaysia.
Prior to consulting, she headed the Department for Middle East & North Africa at KVINFO – a leading Danish institution on Gender, Equality and Diversity. Here she leads the development of strategic partnerships between Denmark and the MENA region, working with over 90 partners within the public, private and civil society sector and the academic world to help increase women’s economic, social and political participation in the region. From 2005-2011, Pilegaard headed the technical programme Support for the NRC-Norwegian Refugee Council’s more than 20 Humanitarian country operations. Pilegaard established and ran NRC in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran as Regional Representative from 2002 to 2005.
Pilegaard has served in various NGO/UN/EU committees and working groups on development and humanitarian aid coordination, Gender, Diversity and transparency. She was a Civil Society Member of the Danish Delegation in the 2013 UN Commission of the Status of Women (CSW) and sat in the council of the NGO Action Aid – Denmark from 2013-2015 and has been a board member of Transparency International – DK Chapter. Pilegaard is appointed Adviser to UN Compact Cities Programme in Australia and sits in the Advisory Board of the Nordic Women’s Mediations Network.
Pilegaard studied Rhetoric with a focus on international peace negotiations at the University of Copenhagen, and is a regular speaker at academic and political institutions, including the NATO school in Oberammergau, Germany and the Global Refugee Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark.