Natalie Miller

Natalie is an experienced entrepreneur and business development professional with a decade and a half experience leading and growing organizations across Africa. She earned her MBA from Saïd Business School at Oxford University where she focused on Entrepreneurship, served as co-Chair of the Africa Business Group, and was selected as a Skoll Associate with the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. Natalie moved to South Africa in 2006 from Washington DC to start up the regional base for the global non-profit organization Operation Smile later becoming Vice President, Africa and then Vice President, Global Business Development. In 2013 Natalie started her own consultancyZARUS Group, focused on supporting social businesses and non-profits with fundraising, strategic positioning, and growth. She worked with a half dozen international non-profits including Greenpeace Africa, Business Bridge, Oxfam, Save the Children, Medecins sans Frontiers (MSF), and Amrefand ran Impact Hub’s Africa Seed Program supporting local founders across the continent start an Impact Hub in their cities and to build partnerships across the region. More recently she has worked with clients such as BackaBuddy and Linked to support the build or re-build of their technology platform to enable scale. In 2016 Natalie joinedZoona, a FinTech money transfer company focused on the unbanked, as Head of Expansion and Commercial Partnerships. In early 2018, Nataliebecame CEO of Green Fingers Mobile an AgriTech company enabling visibility in the value chain and access to market and finance for small farmers. Natalie was selected in the top 100 Women in Fintech 2019 by LATTICE80 and is also an angel investor and director of the Ugandan e-commerce platform Xente. Natalie volunteered as a Facilitator for Grassroots Entrepreneurs in the informal settlements and was a mentor for Barclays’ Tech Africa Accelerator, Startupbootcampand MAN Impact Accelerator. She has coached dozens of start-ups and non-profits through the Bertha Centre for social Innovation at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business and Social Enterprise Academy and most recently with SAB Foundation and Further, the latter of which was born out of the movement and community that was built through Red Bull Amaphiko (Red Bull’s Entrepreneurial Academy.) Utilising 20 years of experience training across Africa and Asia in the health, financial inclusion and Agri space, Natalie co-founded XRGlobal in early 2020 to transform training through virtual reality(VR). Proven to dramatically increase knowledge retention, VR creates immersive, deeper more authentic experiences with no distractions while also significantly decreasing training time and enabling scale.