Karen Mets

Karen Mets works as a Senior Advocacy Adviser with Save the Children, leading the organisation’s asylum and migration-related advocacy and policy work towards the European Union. She has nearly fifteen years of experience working both in politics and for civil society organisations, mainly focussing on migration, human rights and foreign affairs. She started her career working as a political adviser for a State Secretary and a Member of Parliament in Belgium, after which she spent several years working as an Advocacy Manager for Save the Children in the Middle East. After moving back to Brussels, she worked as an adviser for a European political party and then moved back to Save the Children, where she has been leading the work on migration since 2016. She contributed to various reports and studies on children in migration, including the recently launched report ‘from Europe to Afghanistan, experiences of child returnees’ and the advocacy report ‘Keeping Children at the centre, time for EU solidarity in protecting migrant and refugee children’s rights’. She is the president of the Board of La Strada, a research and coordination centre on homelessness in Brussels and she sits on the Board of Flemish Refugee Action. She graduated with honours from the University of Gent, where she specialised in EU Justice and Home Affairs, as part of a Masters degree in Political Science.