Tassilo von Droste zu Hülshoff grew up between Germany and France, educated at a bilingual school in Saint-Cloud before moving through Nancy, Sciences Po Paris, and eventually London, where he completed a master's degree in Environmental Law and Sustainable Development at SOAS. It was an education that kept circling the same question from different angles: what does it mean for a state to be accountable to the people it governs?

That question became a career. Over eighteen years working primarily with GIZ — Germany's international development agency — he has lived and worked in Mauritania, Brussels, South Africa, Chad and Uganda, always somewhere at the intersection of public institutions and the citizens they are supposed to serve. His early work was in public financial management: the unglamorous but foundational task of helping governments build the systems that track whether public money reaches its destination. From there, he moved into the world of supreme audit institutions — the independent bodies that hold governments to account for how they spend — advising AFROSAI, the African umbrella organisation for national auditors, and leading GIZ's Good Financial Governance programme across the continent from Pretoria.

A recurring frustration with that work was that audit reports, however rigorous, too often disappeared into bureaucratic silence. The findings were sound; the accountability loop was broken. That frustration eventually produced CitizensEye — a mobile application developed in 2018 with Ghana's Audit Service that allowed citizens to report service delivery failures directly to the Auditor General, geolocated and in real time. It was the first tool of its kind for a supreme audit institution in Africa, and the model that later became Uganda's Citizen Feedback Platform, now used across twenty local governments.

His most recent role, as Head of Programme for the Strengthening Governance and Civil Society Programme in Uganda, brought together the threads of the preceding years into a single mandate: a €44.7 million initiative working across all regions of the country on civil society capacity, oversight, and inclusive governance. The work ranged from youth parliaments in Karamoja to vocational training centres for persons with disabilities in West Nile to AI innovation workshops for civil society organisations in Kampala.

Alongside his work in development cooperation, he has written — on governance, on culture, on the relationship between institutions and the societies they shape. He co-authored La Révolution Wikipédia, an early study of the encyclopedia's transformation of knowledge and authority, and later wrote Die Entwicklungspolitik der Europäischen Union, an introduction to EU development policy. He has also worked as a freelance journalist, contributing to travel guides and publications in French, German and English.

He is based in Düsseldorf.