Malika Virah-Sawmy started her career as a conservation biologist coordinating conservation programmes for the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) in Madagascar and other Indian Ocean islands. She now works increasingly on inclusive business in the agriculture and ecosystem protection sector. In particular, she works 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 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, a research associate at the University of New South Wales and University of Cape Town. She has a fantastic research records with over more than 20 papers in internally peer reviewed journals in various fields; mining, agriculture and conservation management.