Who is Claire

Since a poster for a charity run for Ethiopia in first grade, being a humanitarian aid worker has been my dream job. I was aged five or six when Ethiopia’s great famine was at its height. On one of the walls in our classroom, there was a poster of a charity run at our primary school. A poster with two little boys, distinctive round bellies, hand in hand, dusty background. I came home enthusiastically, “Mum, Dad, I gotta run, and you have to pay me. With this money, Ethy and Jopy can buy food, and hence they will not be hungry any longer”.

Today, over 35 years later, humanitarian aid work is still my passion, dream, moral obligation, and ambition. However, I have witnessed the shattering of over tens of illusions, changing from an idealist into a pragmatic realist.

My name is Claire; after studying International Development Studies in Wageningen (the Netherlands) and Humanitarian Assistance in Dublin, working in humanitarian assistance. I spend many years with Doctors without Borders (MSF) before embarking on a road as an adviser in (data-driven) innovation in aid. Friends started to call me a human(itarian) HDMI-USB cable. Translating needs and field context into technical requirements and use cases; supporting data scientists, techies, and operational staff to do a better job. Over the last fifteen years, I have worked with many dedicated persons in field offices worldwide, both UN and NGOs. These days, I am back in the Netherlands and have two young sons (adorable ones, as every other mother would say…). These boys have asked the ‘why’ questions a gazillion times a day since they were two. A question we often fail to ask correctly in our sector regarding humanitarian innovation as well as necessary system change.