Henrike Brecht is a Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist in the South Asia Region of the World Bank. She recently relocated from Lao PDR to Singapore. She has more than 12 years of experience at the World Bank in disaster resilience, climate change adaptation, and emergency recovery. Currently, Henrike is coordinating a COVID-19 recovery support operation in Sri Lanka.
Prior to her current role, she was the Southeast Asia Disaster Risk Management Coordinator in the East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) region, where she led the World Bank's dialogue on disaster risk management with the Governments of Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Myanmar. She has been managing various lending operations related to resilient infrastructure, water resource management, and hydrometeorology. She led Post Disaster Needs Assessments and worked on disaster recovery programs in several countries. In the past, Henrike worked with Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), in New Orleans at the Louisiana Hurricane Center after Hurricane Katrina, and in Switzerland, Sudan, and Kenya with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She has an MS in Geoinformatics from the University of Muenster, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Disaster Risk Management from the Louisiana State University.