OUR PEOPLE

Peter Willis is Director of Cambrige Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s Southern African office. He is responsible for the Southern African Senior Executives Seminar of The Prince of Wales’s Business & the Environment Programme. He is also involved in designing sustainability learning programmes for multinational corporations in and outside Africa. Previously Peter was Executive Director of The Natural Step in South Africa, an international NGO consulting to businesses and local authorities around sustainability strategy. Peter has degrees from Oxford and London Universities and has lived in South Africa since 1993.

Magda de Kok is Senior Project Manager of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s Southern African office. She joined CPSL in May 2002 as Seminar Coordinator of the Prince of Wales’ Business & the Environment Programme. In this capacity she coordinates seminars for senior executives in sustainability. Previously she worked at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business for 5 years. There she ran a research programme in entrepreneurship and was instrumental in sourcing the funding and setting up of the UCT Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Magda holds degrees in anthropology and languages from Rand Afrikaans University (now Johannesburg University) and the University of South Africa.

Elspeth Donovan is the Development Director of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s Southern African office. Prior to joining, she was with UCT’s Graduate School of Business from 1999 serving as MBA Director from 2003 - 2006. In her role as director of the MBA programmes she was instrumental in the introduction of the Modular MBA programme and has introduced the role of Business in society as an integrating course on the MBA with a stronger emphasis on sustainable business practice being the underpinning philosophy of the programme. Elspeth co- teaches an elective called Social Entrepreneurship on the MBA at UCT and she teaches Entrepreneurship and Business Planning on AIM, a small business project on PGDBA through a facilitated group process and is designing and directing leadership programmes for Executive Education at the GSB. She also serves on the Board of Christel House South Africa.

Dirk Visser is a Project Manager at Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s South African office. His responsibilities include the local website, the Cambridge Resilience Forum and working on tailor made programmes on risk and innovation. Prior to joining CPSL he has worked on a wide range of projects in the construction, film, technology and education industries. This included developing an accredited seminar series on Green Building in 2007, co-founding a Robotics Academy aimed at school children and co-creating the Open Innovation Studio in Cape Town. Dirk was a co-founder and executive director of Brightest Young Minds, a leading youth driven social entrepreneurship initiative, and has chaired three BYM summits, most recently in July 2009. Dirk is a graduate of Stellenbosch University and is currently busy with a Masters Degree in Futures Studies.