Keynote Speakers

Julie Gichuru is the founder and President and CEO of the Africa Leadership and Dialogue Institute (ALADI), a Pan African organisation that drives progress and influence through African storytelling, knowledge building, agenda setting and leadership development. Julie was the Chief Public Affairs and Communications Officer at the Mastercard Foundation where she led corporate and programmatic communications, policy & thought leadership and public affairs. She helped develop capacity across Africa and Canada, ensuring a consistent focus on African and Indigenous voices, supporting the shift of development approaches to enable communities to lead in driving solutions.

Beatrice Karanja is a global partnerships and strategy executive with over 25 years of experience advising leadership, mobilising capital, and positioning mission-driven organisations for scale across Africa and international ecosystems. Her work spans climate and nature finance, community conservation, institutional strategy, governance, and high-level stakeholder engagement, supporting organisations to translate ambition into fundable, credible, and durable impact.

Across leadership and advisory roles with organisations including Natural State, Nature’s Pitch, Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), and Portland Communications, she has led global partnerships, institutional positioning, communications strategy, and advocacy campaigns, while representing organisations at high-level international forums such as Africa Diaspora Summit, Business of Conservation Conference, Africa Climate Week, the Building Bridges Conference, Harvard Business School Annual SIPS and several other global investment and policy platforms.

An investment professional who has spent the last 20+ years deploying capital into places it doesn’t usually reach, through development finance institutions, private equity, and impact investing across Africa. He has worked across agribusiness, manufacturing, climate finance, healthcare, ecotourism, and financial institutions, and across every layer of the capital stack: equity, debt, guarantees, blended finance. Right now, he leads Africa for WWF’s DFCD and Nectar Fund. Both are origination facilities that use grants and technical assistance to get climate-adaptive, nature-positive businesses investment-ready, then bring in DFIs, private equity funds, banks, and impact investors to fund them. His work spans Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania, Madagascar, and South Africa.