Paula built her professional success providing smart solutions in rapidly changing environments.
Her thirty-year career with the British Council began with building knowledge management systems for development in the Council’s network of libraries in more than a hundred countries. She designed and managed a € 30 million project for information technology development funded by the European Commission.
Her success in nurturing partnerships in Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, culminating in 2000 in a major international conference on building the information community in Africa, led to a four- year secondment at the World Bank in Washington, where she earned a Presidential Award for her work across the Bank’s global network.
In 2004 she returned to the British Council, where she was made Country Director in New Zealand, and subsequently in Nepal and in Southwest China.
Since retiring in 2016, she has achieved creative satisfaction in writing a novel and renovating a farmhouse in southwest France, drawing on diplomatic skills from a lifetime in international relations. She looks forward now to contributing her experience of sound human and financial resource management to a newly-restructured CPDS UK, providing smart solutions for its mission in a rapidly changing post-COVID world.