Malika Virah-Sawmy started her career as a conservation biologist coordinating conservation programmes for the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) in Madagascar and Indian Ocean islands. She has worked increasingly on inclusive business in the agriculture and ecosystem protection sector. In particular, she specialized on production systems reliant on natural resources, climate adaptation for agriculture, and market transformation in commodities that support ecosystem protection and inclusion of smallholder farmers. Her work has taken her in various parts of Africa: Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, amongst others.
Malika provides leadership on social transformation with companies, institutions such as the UN and NGOs and with social movements. Her work is rooted in theory and practice in systems change, collective leadership, futures thinking, innovation, learning, embodiment, and healing.
Malika has fostered transformation in inclusive business models, sustainable production, consumption, and trade, nature-based solutions and community and indigenous rights. She leads social processes for stakeholder engagement, co-creation, climate justice, and Global North-South reconciliation.
She has also also founded Sensemakers Collective: system change facilitators for a global environmental, social and economic transformation. There, she works with her team on systemic strategic planning, purpose-orientation, organisational evaluation, learning, and change and generative futures.
Malika Virah-Sawmy holds a PhD from the University of Oxford on addressing mining – conservation conflicts. She is passionate about making mining more inclusive and achieving no-net-biodiversity loss through biodiversity offset programmes. Aside working in the implementation sector, Malika is also very active in the research field. She is a Lecturer at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a research associate at the University of New South Wales and University of Cape Town. She has more than 30 papers in internally peer reviewed journals in various fields including mining, agriculture and conservation management.
