Jenna Hennebry is a Full Professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA) , Wilfrid Laurier University where she was recently awarded the honour of University Research Professor. She is an active member of the Waterloo Region Local Immigration Partnership Council, Co-Chairs the BSIA Technology Governance Initiative and is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the International Migration Research Centre (IMRC) – a thriving research centre with UN Special Accreditation for the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Prior to joining Laurier in 2005, Dr. Hennebry worked with the Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship (now the Department of Canadian Heritage) in the Research Division (which is now under Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada).
A globally renown migration scholar (h-index = 30) and recognized expert on gender-responsive migration governance and labour migration, Hennebry’s research has been funded by numerous UN agencies (e.g. UN Women, International Organization for Migration, UNODC), government agencies in Canada (e.g. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), as well as government agencies in Spain, Germany, and Mexico. She has mobilized her research on migration governance in relation to labour migration, gender, development, and technology in Canada and internationally in English, French and Spanish in over 150 publications. Hennebry was invited by the UN Special Representative for International Migration, Hon. Louise Arbour, as an Expert Panelist at the 6th Thematic Session of the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) in Geneva on gender and decent work at the United Nations General Assembly in 2017. Hennebry has also been an invited expert speaker at the Global Forum for Migration and Development, the UN Network for Migration (UNNM), and numerous other GCM and UN processes between 2015-2022. In 2022 Hennebry was part of the Government of Canada’s Delegation to the UN International Migration Review Forum, playing an unofficial role of Gender Rapporteur.
Dr. Hennebry has been actively engaged in the development and implementation of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), from the preparatory processes in New York and Geneva to the voting in Marrakesh (2015-2019), to the formation of the UN Network on Migration (UNNM) through annual Migration Week meetings in Geneva, the first IMRF in New York in 2022, to the implementation of the GCM through the UNNM Workstreams, up until the the ongoing planning for the 2026 IMRF. Specifically, Hennebry was a co-founding member of the UN Expert Working Group on Women’s Human Rights in the GCM (2016-2018) during which time Hennebry and colleagues co-authored numerous guidance notes on gender and the GCM and they brought together Member States interested to ensure women’s human rights were central in the GCM (E.g.“Recommendations for addressing women’s human rights in the global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration”). This work directly contributed to the drafting of the Guiding Principle on Gender-Responsiveness. Since then she has been involved in the GCM’s implementation with the UN Network on Migration through numerous roles. She was an active member of Thematic Working Group 4: Bilateral Labour Agreements, of the UN Migration Network which drafted Global Guidance on Bilateral Labour Migration Agreements, and she subsequently Co-lead the Gender Workstream with UN Women, during which time she contributed to the Policies and Practice: A Guide to to Gender Responsive Implementation of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and co-developed the Gender-Responsive Implementation Tool (GRIT) to support the capacity building of Member States. Hennebry has served as a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Migrants (2023-2024), was a member of the former entities: both of the IOM.
Hennebry has also served as an Expert Advisor to the Auditor General of Canada, and has given numerous expert testimonies and statements in Canada to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal; the Supreme Court of Canada, the Senate Standing Committee on Immigration and Citizenship; the Senate Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities; the Employment Standards Act Review; the Canadian House of Commons, numerous federal level consultations; as well as internationally, to UN Treaty Bodies (e.g. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families), and the UN General Assembly.
Dr. Hennebry is the Founder of the Gender+Migration Hub, a global knowledge mobilization hub developed in collaboration with the Women in Migration Network (WIMN) and funded by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). The Hub boasts a global database of gender-responsive policies and practices (drawing from UN, international and national law legal databases, Treaty body reviews including CEDAW, ICRMW, ILO), curated top gender and migration resources, and a range of capacity building tools, guidance notes, recommendations and online videos in English, French and Spanish. The Hub was featured at the International Migration Review Forum in New York in 2022 by then Minister of Immigration, Hon. Sean Fraser, and was previously lauded by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres’ Report on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: in 2020 (A/75/542, para. 31).