Yogavelli Nambiar

<p>Yogavelli Nambiar is the Chief Executive Officer at the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation. Yogavelli Nambiar was previously the Founder-Director of the Enterprise Development Academy at GIBS which she created to offer scholarship-based business education and support to entrepreneurs of start-up, micro and small enterprises. Just over two years old, the Academy team has worked with close to 1,000 entrepreneurs across multiple sectors and levels of business sophistication - from spaza shop owners through to ICT start-ups. The Academy’s well-thought out and comprehensive design has led to it winning an award for “Most Innovative Training Programme” at the Women in Construction Awards 2015. Other accolades include being invited to present the Academy’s model at the Annual Conference of the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centres in the U.S; and representing GIBS as Content Partner for the Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2017. Prior to this, Yogi was the South African Country Director of the successful Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative, one of the largest and most popular women entrepreneurship programmes in the world. The $100m programme provides women entrepreneurs with business and management training, and support services to scale up. Yogi is also a Founder-Director of the Enterprise Development Council of South Africa, an organisation set up to help standardise and professionalise the sector by working with practitioners. She is also a board member of READ Educational Trust and one of the patrons of the Council of 100, a group of 100 leaders from various sectors across the country constituted to promote active citizenship. Further, she was featured in a book called “Inspired” which traced her work in women’s human rights and social entrepreneurship over seven years in India. Previously, Yogi had founded and run two businesses: an exclusive experiential travel company that operated in South Africa and India; and a social development advisory company. Within the latter business, she was part of a team that developed South Africa’s current 2011-2021 National Youth Development Strategy, and of a working group constituted by the Institute of Directors to evolve a Code of Governance for the non-profit sector in South Africa. She has written case studies on 25 social enterprises across the country on behalf of the UN’s International Labour Organisation and has lectured in social entrepreneurship on several programmes. Yogi has an MBA from GIBS, and earlier degrees in Psychology, Development Studies and Communications.</p>