Elise Malherbe

Elise obtained a BSc Civil Engineering degree from UCT and a MBA from the University of Warwick. Her career included three years with the Industrial Development Corporation, which provided excellent exposure to grass roots principles of business. This was followed by over a decade with the M-Net/Naspers Group. Elise joined the group in a strategic development position, but was soon promoted to a line management role running the M-Net Channels and a team of about 75 people. This position also involved a significant amount of international contract negotiation mostly in the States and the UK.

Once Elise started a family, she moved to a more project-based role launching Kyknet, several other DStv channels and finally the group Synergy Process as Group Synergy Director reporting to Koos Bekker for the last three years.

After leaving the Group in 2003 to take a short maternity break after the birth of her third child, Elise spent just over three years consulting to Mark Shuttleworth on his Ubuntu project and then had a stint as a business owner, with a partner buying and later selling a small jewellery manufacturing business.

Working with people and helping to develop their potential had been a strength of Elise’s throughout her time in management and she had developed a strong interest in mentoring and coaching. She has completed the Coaching to Excellence course and then the Associate Coaching course at the Centre for Coaching, part of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town. She is also Insights Discovery Accredited and has a IEQ Full Accreditation Level 1 from Integrative Enneagram Solutions. Elise does coaching work in the private and public sector, mainly focusing on corporate coaching. Elise is a member of the International Coaches Federation

She is also involved with the NGO Partners for Possibility, where she was a Business partner to the principal of Thomas Wildschutt Senior Primary School in Retreat. Elise is on the Board of the literacy NGO help2read. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Elise is the volunteer head of the Constantia Community Action Network (CAN),  one of the CAN’s formed under Cape Town Together as an emergency reponse to the effects of the pandemic, especially hunger. Constantia CAN was partnered with Khayelitsha Site B, where they support 21 soup kitchens, serving over 3000 meals a day. The partnership distributed over 1 millon meals to the value of R4.6m over the 12 month period from April 2020 to the end March 2021.