Malika Virah-Sawmy began her career as a conservation biologist and park ranger in Madagascar and across the Indian Ocean islands. After completing her PhD at the University of Oxford on human–nature conflict, she worked as a sustainability practitioner and systems scientist across Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America. Over the past 20 years, her work has focused on sustainable agriculture, climate change adaptation, and natural resource management. While many initiatives achieved tangible successes, she began to see clearly that underlying ways of thinking continued to reinforce the very systemic issues they sought to solve. Complex problems couldn’t be addressed with the same mindset that created them.

Recognising how dominant worldviews perpetuate control, separation, and extraction, Malika embarked on a personal decolonial journey. She retrained in generative, systemic, and decolonial approaches that emphasise interdependence, relationality, and co-flourishing. Today, she works as a facilitator, activist, storyteller, and community weaver, dedicated to nature connection, social justice, and collective healing. Her practice brings together somatic and ancestral wisdom with systems change, collaborative reimagining, and human-centred design to nurture meaningful transformation.

Malika is an Associate with Endeva and the founder of the Sensemakers Collective, which engages in systems innovation and dialogic exploration. She also nurtures Ubuntu Cocreate, where she supports capacity building for systemic and decolonial practice, solidarity actions, and collective flourishing. As a community builder, she founded a solidarity experiment connecting Europeans with refugees in Africa’s largest refugee camp, fostering reciprocal collaboration while actively confronting power and privilege. She lives in Hof Prädikow, a community in Brandenburg dedicated to land care, community living, and  deepening relationships and opportunities for the region.