Stefan Schmitz is Deputy Director-General and Commissioner for the “One World – No Hunger” Initiative at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in Bonn.

For the last eight years he has been leading the rural development, agriculture and food security work at BMZ. From 2007 until 2009 he worked as senior advisor to the Secretariat of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, leading the work on Managing for Development Results. Before that he coordinated the German bilateral cooperation programme with South Africa and Namibia and was deputy head of the infrastructure division at the BMZ.

Before joining the BMZ in 2001, Stefan Schmitz held different posts in the German federal administration in the fields of statistical information systems, regional planning and international cooperation on urban issues. Over the years he held numerous lectureships at different German universities. He received scholarships of the McCloy Fellowship of the American Council on Germany and of the German Academic Exchange Service. In 1985 he graduated from Bonn University in geography and mathematics and received a Ph.D. in geosciences from the Free University of Berlin in 2000.