Sophia Wolpers is a Manager in LaMP’s team based in Berlin, Germany. At LaMP she is responsible for migration corridors to Europe, especially Germany, and for labor migration in the Australia-Pacific region.
Together with sending/receiving governments and other relevant stakeholders, she develops strategies and practical solutions to streamline and scale labor migration: from first-mile financing issues, language learning, Skills partnerships, responsible recruitment to migration policy and processes.
Sophia’s big focus is on bridging the gap between migration and financing solutions. She is supporting the government of Papua New Guinea in creating a sustainable system for workers to access all relevant documents and increase ability to mobilize on time to job opportunities under PALM in Australia.
Her work in Germany brings together financing, scaling and Skills Partnerships and the big question of how to turn them into a credible and sustainable pipeline to solve the labor shortages the German labor market is facing.
Before she joined LaMP, she was a Programme Director for Immigration and Brexit policy at the business membership organization BusinessLDN (formerly London First), where she led all policy and campaigning work for her focus area, including coalition building with other trade bodies and NGOs.
Her career in migration began in 2014, working for IOM and UNHCR in Egypt supporting communication strategies and creating forecasting models for migration flows in Northern and West Africa and the Mediterranean. A large part of this work was focused on better understanding how migrants make decisions while on the move.
She holds a master’s degree in International Relations and Migration Studies from the University of Amsterdam and a bachelor’s degree in International Economics and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Tübingen. She also spent a year at the University of Michigan deepening her understanding of trade economics and economic relations.
