Cape Town, South Africa

The Prince of Wales's Business and Sustainability Programme Senior Executive seminar will be held at the Spier Hotel & Conference Centre, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa. 

Read more information about the seminar.

This three-day seminar is designed for managers in organisations from the private or public sector to equip them with a high-level understanding of sustainability. Sustainability is no longer a bolt-on to a ‘business-as-usual’ approach, but is something that must become deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of an organisation

Peter Willis is Director of the South African office of CPSL, which was established in 2002 to design and run executive seminars in the region. In this role he organises and chairs the Cape Town seminar of The Prince of Wales’s Business & Sustainability Programme. He is also involved in designing sustainability learning programmes for multinational corporations in and outside Africa. From 1999 to 2002 Peter was Executive Director of The Natural Step in South Africa, an international NGO consulting to businesses and local authorities on sustainability strategy. Prior to that he was Programme Manager at the Environmental Monitoring Group in Cape Town, focusing on setting up dialogues between legislators, industry and affected communities, particularly in the mining sector. Peter has a degree in Modern History from Oxford and in Education from London University. During the 1980s and early 1990's he ran a number of businesses in the UK. He moved to Cape Town with his South African-born wife in 1993.

peter.willis@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

Magda de Kok is Operations Manager of CPSL's South African office. She joined The Prince of Wales's Business & Sustainability Programme in May 2003, after being with the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business for five 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. Previously she played a pivotal role in the setting up of the Language Facilitation Programme at the University of the Free State. Magda holds degrees in languages from the Rand Afrikaans University and the University of South Africa.

magda.dekok@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

Elspeth Donovan joined CPSL as Development Director in the South African office in November 2008. She is currently a tutor on the Postgraduate Certificate in Sustainable Business and the Anglo American Advanced Social Management Programme. In South Africa she directs the Sustainability Practitioner programme. From 2003–2006 she was the director of the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School MBA during which time she introduced sustainability into the core curriculum. She still regularly supervises MBA theses in the broad area of sustainability. From 2006 she was an independent executive education consultant, designing and directing various leadership programmes for companies through the UCT Graduate School of Business. She is on the Board of Christel House South Africa, a privately run school for children from impoverished backgrounds. Elspeth has a BSc and an MBA from University of Cape Town.

elspeth.donovan@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

Gary is the Deputy Director of CPSL's Cape Town office, having been working on projects with the Cape Town office of CPSL since January 2011. He previously led SustainAbility’s London-based think tank function. Gary has advised several leading companies on how to approach and tackle sustainability challenges, including Coca-Cola, Ford, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, Rio Tinto, A.P. Møller-Maersk and Shell. Previously, Gary spent two years working in WWF’s Global Climate & Energy program, where his main interests were the causes of – and solutions to – the challenges associated with society’s addiction to hydrocarbon fuels. This followed nine years in the oil industry with Mobil and ExxonMobil, spanning diverse roles from Research and Product Development to Sales, Marketing, and Business Development. Working across Europe, the US and Asia offered Gary first-hand insight to the strategic and day-to-day sustainability challenges posed by one of the world’s most problematic sectors. Gary is the author of the WWF publication 'Plugged In: The End of the Oil Age'. He regularly contributes articles in the media and speaks at international conferences.

gary.kendall@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

Dirk is based in CPSL's Cape Town office. His responsibilities include the Cambridge Resilience Forum and designing and delivering tailored corporate programmes on risk and innovation. He also serves as faculty for the Cambridge Sustainability Practitioners Programme. At recent conferences he has presented on 'Sustainable Infrastructure Investment', 'Open Innovation' and 'Business and the Common Good'.

Prior to joining CPSL, Dirk worked on a wide range of projects in the construction, film and education industries. This included developing an accredited seminar series on Green Building in 2007 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. Dirk is a graduate of Stellenbosch University and is currently busy with a Master's Degree in Futures Studies.

dirk.visser@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

It is with great sadness that we report that Peet du Plooy was killed in what appears to have been a robbery at his home in Johannesburg on March 10th. We were not only proud to have Peet as one of CPSL’s Senior Associates – he was regarded by all in the South African sustainability field as a true pioneer – we also looked forward to every opportunity to work with him, such was his passionate enthusiasm, humour and incisive intelligence. He in his turn left us in no doubt that he felt hugely honoured and excited to have his working relationship with the CPSL South African team acknowledged in his Senior Associate status, so the feeling was clearly mutual. To know Peet was to love him and his sudden death leaves an ache and a gap in the lives and hearts of those of us privileged to have worked alongside him. Peter Willis and Gary Kendall represented CPSL at a very moving memorial service held for Peet on the 15th March near Pretoria. To read a tribute from his colleagues at TIPS, where he had his ‘day job’, please see http://www.tips.org.za/.

Peet was Programme Manager: Sustainable Growth at TIPS (Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies), a government-aligned economic think-tank based in Pretoria. He had a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria. After working in energy R&D (coal combustion) at the national utility Eskom, he joined the global environmental NGO WWF as Trade & Investment Advisor for South Africa. He was elected in 2009 as founding chair of the Environmental Goods and Services Forum, the South African green industries association. His areas of expertise lay in networked infrastructure (including energy, transport and ICT) and the economics of sustainability. He contributed to a number of seminars and other CPSL programmes in South Africa between 2008 and 2013.

Enos is a South African entrepreneur and investment banker who is founder and CEO of the Freetel Group of Companies. Freetel focuses on fund management, portfolio investments and investment and transaction advice to a select number of sovereign and international clients. Enos has advised in some of the seminal transactions in South Africa, including the then ground breaking partial privatisation of Telkom SA. He has served as chairman of the South African National Electricity Regulator and Chairman of the Municipal Infrastructure Investment Unit of the SA Government. He was country head for Credit Suisse First Boston (a global investment bank) and later, head of Africa for HSBC Corporate and Investment Bank, after which he established Freetel. He has developed policies in ICT and drafted national laws in telecommunications and municipal finance and BEE. He is admitted to the New York law bar, and he is an Advocate of the Supreme Court of South Africa. Enos is a member of the Board of MMC Norilsk Nickel and the Chairman of the company's budget committee, and is on the Board of Supergroup.

Richard Calland has for the past seventeen years been working in the fields of democratic governance and sustainable development in South Africa and beyond. Based at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he is Associate Professor in Public Law. Richard specialises in freedom of information law and was recently appointed as a member of the Independent Access to Information Appeals’ Board of the World Bank. Recently, Richard has acted as governance advisor to the international Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST) – which aims to set new standards for information disclosure in public infrastructure projects – assisting with the implementation of the pilot programme in Tanzania, Zambia, Ethiopia, Zambia and Vietnam. His current research focus is the governance of climate change and climate finance, as a part of UCT’s African Climate Development Initiative.

Richard is the founding partner of the new Climate Finance Hub and as Senior Associate of CPSL, acts as a member of faculty on a number of programmes for senior leadership of organisations such as PwC, the World Bank and Tata. In South Africa he advises Massmart, Africa’s largest retailer that was recently acquired by Walmart, on issues of politics, sustainability and governance. Before moving to South Africa in 1994, Richard practiced law for seven years at the London Bar. From 1995–2011, he headed the Economic Governance programme at Idasa – Africa's leading democracy Institute. Richard's latest book 'Zuma's World: South Africa's Changing Anatomy of Power' will be published in 2013.

Anton is an economist at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. His research is focused on the interactions between ecological degradation and human well-being in cities. He is director of Econologic where he has completed contracts for the World Bank, The European Union, DfID, WWF, local and international companies, NGOs and local governments. He is the founder of the Promoting Access to Carbon Equity (PACE) centre, which enables small-scale renewable energy and energy efficiency projects to benefit from carbon market investments. He is an associate of the Stockholm Environment Institute. At the African Centre for Cities he previously convened the City of Cape Town's Climate Change Think Tank, an inter-disciplinary partnership between civil society, business and government. Currently his research position is funded by the Mistra Urban Futures programme and involves a three year knowledge co-generation project with the City of Cape Town around the green economy. His postgraduate qualifications were obtained from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Edgar is holder of the DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Urban Policy, directs the African Centre for Cities and is Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, all at the University of Cape Town. He has served as a Faculty Member of the Prince of Wales’s Business & Sustainability Programme at several seminars worldwide. In earlier roles he served as Special Advisor to the Premier of the Western Cape Provincial Government and directed a number of urban policy think tanks before his stint in government. He is a founder member of Isandla Institute, serves on the Boards of the Sustainability Institute and the Cape Town Partnership; and is a member of the Research Advisory Committee of the Gauteng City-region Observatory and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He regularly provides advisory services to international development agencies such as: UN-Habitat, African Development Bank, DBSA, National Planning Commission, OECD urban division and UNEP. Edgar holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, an MA in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies (The Hague, The Netherlands) and BA-Honours from the University of the Western Cape.

Stefan (BA LLB) resides in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a qualified lawyer, arbitrator, mediator, facilitator and trainer. He is currently CEO and founding director of SouthSouthNorth Group, which has played a leading role in climate change issues since 1999. In addition he facilitates various large projects, notably the South African Cabinet Mandated Long Term Mitigation Scenario Planning Project (LTMS). Stefan has assisted in the establishment of Designated National Authorities (DNA’s) in South Africa, Ghana, Namibia and Mozambique. He has led the facilitation of projects within the Development Bank of Southern Africa’s Sustainable Communities Program, applying development facilitation technologies which he has developed over the last 15 years. Stefan is a director of Energy Transformation cc which develops climate change projects for the private sector.

Bob studies the effects of human activities on ecosystems, and in particular on woodlands and savannas in Africa. He has published widely in the field of global change, including popular and scientific books. He is or has been a member of several steering committees of international research programmes such as the Global Climate Observing System, and serves as a convening lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is currently chair of the global Biodiversity Observation Network and co-chair of DIVERSITAS. He is a Fellow of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the South African Academy and the Royal Society of South Africa, an A-rated scientist and an honorary professor at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Andrew’s role as CEO of the Wildlands Conservation Trust is built on 20 years of environmental experience, ranging from wetland ecology to community based conservation. His primary leadership focus has been on forming partnerships between South Africa’s Government, Business and NGO communities, aimed at restoring and conserving our natural heritage through people based approaches. Under his leadership, Wildlands has grown to become one of South Africa’s leading environmental NGOs and a recognised leader in the Climate Change related field of Community Ecosystem Based Adaptation.