Biography
Willem Heemskerk
RIU Institutional histories

Willem Heemskerk is a management and organisation specialist in agricultural service delivery, community empowerment and local governance, particularly in research and extension.

Willem has 25 years of experience (20 years based abroad and 5 years of short-term assignments) in the management of organizational and institutional development at the local level in Africa, Latin America and Asia. He has expertise in facilitating demand-driven and client-oriented service delivery with a multi-stakeholder perspective.

Willem has worked, often as a team leader, for different organizations such as the Dutch Directorate-General for International Development Cooperation (DGIS), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Bank and European Union and for national ministries of agriculture and local government in Sao Tome and Principe, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia. He has also participated in short-term assignments and international workshops in Brazil, the Philippines, and Bolivia and in many other countries. Mr Heemskerk is the author and co-author of numerous reports and publications on client-oriented research topics and themes.

Currently based at KIT in Amsterdam, he works in the field of sector policy, agricultural service delivery and local development, mainly in Sub-Saharan African countries. He works in partnership with organizations in Africa for the development of guidelines for enhanced involvement of the private sector and farmer organizations in agricultural service delivery and local governance.

His work for RIU has involved researching and producing a series of intuitional histories of RIU programmes in Zambia, Malawi and Nigeria.