About

Vanessa Hans is Head of Private Sector at the Basel Institute on Governance. She has held the position since July 2022, having first joined the Basel Institute in January 2020 as Private Sector Specialist.

In her role, she leads a team of compliance and Collective Action specialists, taking a dual approach to engaging and strengthening the private-sector response to corruption risks in business transactions: by advancing anti-corruption Collective Action, and through technical assistance to private corporations and state-owned enterprises.

She regularly advises organisations ranging from small and medium enterprises to multinationals, state-owned enterprises and international organisations on topics relating to governance, ethics and compliance. She also leads the Basel Institute’s work on synergies between corruption and business and human rights as well as in the humanitarian sector.

Vanessa is a Board member of the United Nations Global Compact Network Switzerland and Liechtenstein. She also is a member of the Advisory Group of the Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia and the Pacific (ACI) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as well as the Anti-Corruption Leaders Hub of the OECD under the Global Initiative to Galvanize the Private Sector as Partners in Combatting Corruption and the UNCAC Working Group on Human Rights and Corruption. She is part of the Independent Sustainability Sounding Board of Argor-Heraeus, a Switzerland-based gold refiner.

Prior to joining the Institute, Vanessa was the Managing Director of the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the Philippines where she established the first network-wide code of conduct and was appointed Data Privacy Officer. She initiated multi-stakeholder C-level committees addressing challenges across: gender, youth, infrastructure, agribusiness, and market access. Under her leadership, the Chamber won the French public service delegation contract as the only trade agency in the country under Team France Export.

She previously worked at several non-profit organisations focusing on corporate social responsibility and international development strategies.

She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration with a minor in International Relations from HEC Montreal and a Master of Science in Corporate Social Responsibility from the Nottingham University Business School.

Vanessa is a competitive long-distance cyclist and a certified mountain bike instructor.