David Verboom

David Verboom is a leader and coordinator with 27 years of experience in the private and humanitarian sectors. With 22 years of field-based experience, he has been involved in humanitarian interventions in response to all the major recent emergencies in the world, such as the tsunami in Asia, the Syrian conflict in the Middle East, and the Sudan famine in Africa.

David started his higher education at the High Technical College of Automotive Engineering in the Netherlands. He then went on to study at the Twente School of Management, earning his Master of Business Administration degree in 1992.

His work experience started in the Dutch Army as a conscripted officer working at the Technical Service. After finishing his MBA, he worked for four years with various management consultancy firms advising multinationals on how to develop their strategic, financial, and project management capacities.

In 1996 David started his career in the humanitarian and development sectors where he worked for NGOs and donors. His first job, as Medair's Country Director for Kenya and South Sudan, was during the 1998 drought and famine. He then took up the Operational Director’s function at Medair headquarters in Switzerland, from where he started up and managed the organisation’s emergency relief and recovery programmes in Africa and Asia. In that capacity, he also initiated Medair's Quality Improvement process, resulting in Medair being the first humanitarian agency to become ISO 9001 certified. This application of international quality standards to the humanitarian sector was not only groundbreaking work, it was also unique in defining the affected people as the organisation's primary clients.

In 2002, David returned to the field as Country Director, leading ZOA Refugee Care’s programme in Sri Lanka, which focused on community recovery interventions in response to the civil war. This was followed by the Asian tsunami disaster response, after which he joined the largest humanitarian donor when he was asked to open and lead the office for Sri Lanka and Maldives as Head of Office for the European Union’s humanitarian department (ECHO). This was followed by taking up the function of ECHO Head of Regional Office for East Asia and the Pacific, which included overseeing humanitarian programmes in Mongolia, Indonesia, Myanmar, North Korea, and Papua New Guinea, et al. In 2013, he was asked to take on the job of ECHO Head of Regional Office for the Middle East, covering the response programmes in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel. Palestine, and Yemen.

In 2015, David returned to an implementing agency as National Director with World Vision Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. In this capacity, he led humanitarian and development programmes focusing on health, education, resilience, and protection of affected children. David Verboom became Medair’s Chief Executive Officer in April 2018.

David is a Dutch national. He is married to Inge Wessels and they have three teenage children.