Karen has had a lifelong passion for environmental issues and her 20-year career has been shaped by the Malawi Environmental Endowment Trust (MEET), where she currently works as the National Coordinator. MEET was one of the first Conservation Trust Funds (CTF) to be established in Malawi as an independent grant making institution that provides sustainable financing for biodiversity and natural resource management initiatives. Karen is responsible for providing strategic leadership to drive overall institutional strategy and operations to ensure that funds are mobilized, managed and disbursed to projects that yield positive conservation in accordance with national policies and plans specifically in the areas of landscape restoration, wetlands and waste management. She was instrumental in developing and implementing the guiding grant policy which has benefitted just over 250 environmental projects (in energy, environmental education, landscape restoration, waste management, human/wildlife conflict, wetlands, climate change) with community based organisations, local non-governmental organisations, academia and government.

Karen Price holds a Bachelor of Social Science (Honours) degree in Environmental Management, from the University of Cape Town, South Africa and a Master of Science (MSc.) in Environment and Development from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. In terms of regional or continental experience, she was President of the Consortium of African Funds for the Environment (CAFÉ) from 2017 to 2022. CAFÉ is a network of nineteen CTF’s on the continent that strives to build the capacity of CTF’s by sharing of experiencing whilst pursuing innovative financing mechanisms that support conservation.
She has also served and continues to serve on various boards. She is the outgoing Chairperson of BASEflow Malawi, an organization that seeks to improve the sustainability of groundwater sources in Malawi; she’s Chairperson of the Board of Directors for the Centre for Environmental Policy (CEPA), an organisation that conducts research and advocacy on environmental and natural resource management policy and legislation; a Board member of the Coordination Union for the Rehabilitation of the Environment (CURE) an organization that works to provide technical support and improve networking amongst non-governmental organizations, the Government of Malawi, donors and other organizations or individuals working in the area of the environment; and a board member of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority (AERA). She is also a member of the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESARO) Regional Committee of International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Karen hopes to inspire the next generation and to expand her role and contributions to the sector and the region by exploring innovative financing and alternative approaches that enable greater participation and contributions towards the development of innovative environmental management solutions based in social enterprise and communities of practice.