Susan has spent her 30 year career founding, building and managing businesses either focused on or located in global emerging markets, with the last 13 years spent primarily in Africa. After having been trained as a lawyer, Susan’s early work experience included senior management roles with JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. In 1997, Susan co-founded a hedge fund and, on its sale, focused on food security in Africa. In 2016, Susan co-founded Holistic Agricultural Investments Group Ltd, a venture capital company specialising in sustainable agricultural early stage investments. In 2020, Susan co-founded Sustainable Planet, an agri tech start up focused on addressing food security and climate change concurrently. In 2022, she co-founded and Chairs GLIDE Fund, a gender lens investment fund to finance and mentor female-led SME’s across Africa. In January 2023, Sustainable Planet won, out of 667 companies across 79 countries, the global Food Tech Challenge agri-tech award and was also nominated for the 2023 Earthshot Prize. In June 2023, Sustainable Planet won the Regional Finals, Southern Africa of the African Start Up Awards, coming top 71 out of 8,200 companies, and is now in the final. Susan was previously awarded a Shell UK Woman of the Future Award, was twice listed by Financial News as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential Women in European Finance”. She is also an Advisory Board Member of the African Agri Council and was previously on the World Bank Supervisory Committee establishing Guidelines on Global Agricultural Practises and on the UN FAO Advisory Council on Private Investment into Agriculture. Susan has a BA Hons, MA, LLB (Law) and MBA diploma and has studied at Oxford University, England; McGill University, Canada; St Andrews University, Scotland and London School of Economics. She is also an Executive Coach and a distance runner on both the Great Britain and the England Masters Athletics teams, and most recently won on Team GB the 2023 World Championship Gold (Half Marathon) and Bronze (X Country).