Ms. Alice Ruhweza is the Africa Region Director for the World-Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), where she leads and oversees a regional program comprising 10 countries and 400 staff. She is leading the design of a new conservation framework that brings together work at national, transboundary and global levels, as well as development of a new system of program quality assurance. Prior to WWF, Alice worked for Conservation International (CI) first as Executive Director of the Vital Signs Programme (www.vitalsigns.org) where she championed data-driven policy making in four countries, and helped to grow Vital Signs’ reach to 12 additional countries, expanding the use of the program’s data, and building connections with new partners and funders. She later served as Interim Vice President of Sustainable Production where she engaged across sectors to co-design a program that will enable African governments and businesses to adopt sustainable pathways for production sectors including Agriculture, Mining, Oil & Gas, Fisheries & Renewable energy, representing trillions of dollars across these nations’ economies. In her last year at CI she was promoted to Vice President of Programs and Partnerships, where she brought together science, strategy and fundraising to build stronger partnerships and programs and align regionallevel and interrelated country-level work across the continent. Prior to joining CI, Alice spent 6 and a half years with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) where she was the Team Leader of the UNDP’s Global Environment Finance Unit in Africa. Alice and her team of 15 Technical Advisors raised over $600 million to support over 40 countries in sub Saharan Africa to put in place the right mix of policy, regulatory and financial incentives to attract and drive public and private sector investment towards addressing their environment and sustainable development priorities including; sustainable management of ecosystem goods and services; affordable and accessible energy services; scaling up climate change adaptation and mitigation; improved water and ocean governance, to mention a few. This support entailed identifying the most strategic opportunities and innovative funding sources and conceptualizing projects or programmes that enabled the countries to access such funding. Before joining UNDP, Alice worked for the National Environment Management Authority in Uganda, Forest Trends (USA), Sprint Corporation (USA), and as a consultant for the World Bank, UNEP Economics and Trade Branch, the UNFCCC Secretariat, the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development, and the Institute for European Environmental Policy on a wide range of issues ranging from the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, Trade and the Environment, Environmental Governance, Innovative Finance and many more. Alice holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Sciences from Makerere University (Uganda), and a Master’s Degree in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin (USA). She is an Aspen New Voices Senior Fellow, a Henry Arnhold Conservation Fellow and a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar. She sits of the Boards of the CGIAR; the Global Ever-Greening Alliance and on the steering committee of the Future Earth Water-Food-Energy Nexus working group.