St Edmund Hall, Oxford, is pleased to announce the third seminar in our ‘Conversations in Environmental Sustainability: beyond greenwashing’ series:
Seminar 3: ‘No One Left Behind’: Environmental Challenges and Solutions for developing countries.
This is a free public event open to all on a first-come-first served basis and is kindly sponsored by Ninety One.
Speaker Bios:
Bayo Owolabi is a technology enthusiast with a professional focus on energy and the energy transition. He has extensive cross-functional business experience and deep energy sector expertise, having spent his career building and running high-performing teams that solve tough problems for his clients. At BCG, he works with both the Energy and Climate & Sustainability practices to help governments and private sector clients navigate the transition to a low-carbon future.
Anousheh Ansari is CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Ansari, along with her family, sponsored the organization’s first competition, the Ansari XPRIZE, a $10 million competition that ignited a new era for commercial spaceflight. Since then, she has served on XPRIZE’s Board of Directors.
Deirdre Cooper is Head of Sustainable Equity at Ninety One. Deirdre is a leading voice in understanding and committing to sustainable investing, particularly investment to address and combat climate change. Ninety One’s Global Environment Strategy, which she co-manages, invests in companies enabling the transition to a low-carbon economy to capture the structural growth driven by decarbonization. Prior to joining Ninety One in 2018, Deirdre was a Partner, Portfolio Manager and Head of Research at Ecofin. Before joining Ecofin, Deirdre was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley where she headed their European Renewable Energy coverage effort and built an investment banking and principal investing franchise. She has long had a passion for sustainable investing and has worked on a voluntary basis in the microfinance sector both in the US and in Pakistan. She is a member of the advisory board of Girls Who Invest, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to increase the percentage of the world’s investable capital run by women, as well as the advisory board for Imperial College’s Centre for Climate Finance and Investment. She is a peer reviewer for the IEA’s World Energy Outlook. Deirdre earned her MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar, and her BA in Actuarial Science from University College Dublin.
Khalid Abdelgadir is a Sudanese entrepreneur working in agribusiness. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Khartoum. After his graduation, he worked in the private sector in both KSA and Sudan. Khalid is very keen on tackling the food loss problem by making solutions that bridge the gaps within the food value chain. In 2020, he co-founded a startup that gives farmers access to cold storage services using solar energy. After finishing his studies, Khalid aspires to continue building innovative solutions that enhance food security and achieve social stability for African smallholder farmers. Khalid is an award-winning Orange Corners Sudan alumni and his startup was awarded a seed fund prize from the programme.
