Professional History: Narassa Govender serves as the Corporate Social Investment (CSI) Director at Ninety One, where she leads global initiatives focused on economic inclusion. Her latest initiative is the creation of the Ninety One Accelerator in support of The Earthshot Prize. Before assuming her current role, she spent four years in the company's Product Development team.

She also serves as a current member of the Beneficiary Selection Committee of Entrepreneurship Development Trust and is a member of the Advisory Group for Wits H20.

Before joining Ninety One, Narassa was an investment specialist at GroFin, an SME financier working in Africa and Middle East. She also worked at a South African SME start-up that was taking an innovative approach to transformation, combining the search fund model with that of enterprise and supplier development goals of large corporates in South Africa.

Prior to the work in the SME space, she spent six years at Sygnia Asset Management, joining the company as a trainee quantitative analyst when they were just 27 people, and leaving six years later when the company was about to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. During her final years at the business, she was responsible for managing the quantitative analysis team and the manager research process and she was appointed to the position of executive director.

Academic and professional credentials: Bachelor of Business Science in Finance from the University of Cape Town
Certificate in Public Policy Analysis from the London School of Economics and Political Science

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