Esha Van Der Hulst-Haldar

With Indian/Dutch roots, Esha van der Hulst-Haldar started her career with KPMG in 1993 as Certified Public Auditor specialized in multinationals and business advice such as implementation of ERP systems and mergers and acquisitions due diligence. In 1999, she took additional roles on like becoming the first focal point on safeguarding and discrimination.

For 20+ years Esha has been ultimately responsible for operational, change, information and data and financial management with Government (Dutch Ministry of Education), Large NGOs like COA and Oxfam.

In 2006 Esha became Head of the Education Information Department with the Dutch Government, implementing a new data strategy to share high quality education data via a data warehouse and portals with stakeholders such as all parents and all schools and universities in The Netherlands.

From 2008 up to 2020 Esha worked for Oxfam in various roles like Chair of the Finance Directors, Change Director and as Global COO for Oxfam International since April 2017. Her role was to lead the execution of Oxfam’s 2020 strategy together with Oxfam International Management team and member organization management teams. This included the merger of country teams in over 50 program countries into One Oxfam reaching over 25 million people, supporting new Oxfam’s like Oxfam Turkey to join as members and design and implementation of collective funding mechanisms to enable this transformation. Esha was also one of the leaders ensuring that Oxfam improved its ways of working on safeguarding via a 10 step action plan globally after the Haiti inquiries.

In June 2020, Esha took the next step in this journey and joined War Child as Director Shared Operations to implement a multi locational shared platform including shared power with people from various countries like Burundi and Lebanon. Also she helped to scale the on line education program Can’t Wait to Learn to all children in and outside Ukrain impacted by war before the start of this new schoolyear in September.

From 2008 onwards Esha joined various Boards like the Board of Triple Jump and ICDI. With Triple Jump she kept oversight on the scaling journey from 50 million funds available for microfinance up to over 500 million funds.

Esha earned her MBA from Erasmus University Rotterdam and accomplished additional courses like International Economics via the London School of Economics and change management via Harvard Business School. She regularly serves as a women mentor and keynote speaker in networks like NetHope.