Kathi Zellweger

Kathi Zellweger is a senior aid manager with over thirty years of field experience in Hong Kong, China, and North Korea. She was based in Pyongyang for five years (2006–2011) as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), an office of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before joining SDC, from 1978 to 2006, Zellweger worked in a senior post for the Catholic Agency Caritas in Hong Kong, where she played a key role in pioneering Caritas’s involvement in China and North Korea.

She also managed the Hong Kong–based KorAid Limited, a nonprofit she established in 2015 to focus on serving children in institutions and people with disabilities in North Korea. Zellweger is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University in California. She holds a master’s degree in international administration from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.