Paulien leads the Internal Audit team of ICRC, comprised of 24 team members across 3 locations: Manila, Nairobi and Geneva. The Internal Audit function of ICRC has grown over the last 3 years to ensure the team’s diversity and collective coverage of relevant skills and expertise.

Paulien has a background in Management, Change and Sustainability with an MSc Degree in International Business from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management and Sustainability with Honors from Waikato University in New Zealand.

She holds a Certification in Internal Audit and in Change Management. She started her professional career with KPMG as a Consultant and Auditor of multinational organizations in the field of Sustainability. After several years in this role, she became the Managing Director of United World Colleges the Netherlands, a foundation focused on education that provides scholarships to students worldwide for the last two years of their high school. She herself is an alumna of the United World College in Hong Kong.

She entered ICRC in 2015 as a Finance & Administration Manager in the field. After three missions in Djibouti (for Yemen Support), Lebanon and South Sudan, she came to the Headquarters in 2018 as Internal Controller. In this function, she carried out regular field visits to evaluate the management of risks & controls related to the support functions. She temporarily worked with the Ethics, Risk & Compliance Office’s Investigation Unit before joining Internal Audit in 2021. Paulien fulfilled the role of lead auditor and Audit manager prior to her current role as Deputy Head of Internal Audit.