Dr. Hans-Joachim Preuß is a businessman and agricultural economist. After postgraduate studies at the German Development Institute (today: IDOS), he first worked for five years for the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ; today: GIZ) in Mauritania and Benin. At the Center for Regional Development Research at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, he then supervised, among other things, a doctoral program for African agricultural economists and received his doctorate with a thesis on questions concerning the organization of national agricultural research systems in Africa. He was then employed as a senior management consultant at GTZ headquarters before moving to Deutsche Welthungerhilfe in Bonn as head of the program department. There he took over the position of Secretary General in 2002. In 2009, the Supervisory Board of GIZ appointed him to the company's Executive Board. From 2018 until his retirement, Preuß served as the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's regional representative for Benin, Burkina Faso and Togo, based in Cotonou.
In addition to his work on the Supervisory Board of the Berlin Governance Platform, Preuß is a lecturer at the Rheinische Wilhelms University in Bonn, a member of the Board of Directors of Andheri-Hilfe Bonn, Chairman of Tagungshaus Hunsrück e.V. and a member of the Advisory Board of the Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik.
He is married and has three grown daughters.