Dr. Axel Harneit-Sievers took over as director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation's (HBF) India Office in Delhi in March 2011. Before, he has been heading two international HBF offices, in Lagos (Nigeria) in the period 2002-06, and in Nairobi (Kenya, Regional Office for East Africa and the Horn of Africa) from late 2006 to early 2011. Besides his  expertise in the areas of political analysis, sustainable development and climate policy, he has been involved in implementing the "China - Africa Civil Society Dialogue", organized jointly by HBF Beijing and HBF Nairobi.

By his professional background, Axel Harneit-Sievers is a historian and political scientist who has specialized in African Studies. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Hannover (Germany) in 1990 and thereafter worked for more than a decade at universities and research institutions in Germany, especially the Center for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin and the Institute of African Affairs in Hamburg. He concluded his "habilitation" at Hannover University in 2001-02 with a work on the social history of Southeastern Nigeria, published as "Constructions of Belonging. Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century" (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press 2006). He published books and articles on the history and current affairs of Nigeria, Namibia, Kenya and Somalia, and edited a book on local historical writing in Africa and India ("A Place in the World. New Local Historiographies from Africa and South Asia"; Leiden: Brill 2002).