Bio
Nicki brings deep expertise in fund and program management, with a focus on climate resilience, sustainability, and digital innovation. She leads Caribou’s Funds and Programs practice, working across teams to embed best practices and ensure program insights are shared effectively to deliver the highest quality services to clients. She also oversees Caribou’s Climate Resilience & Sustainability portfolio (formerly Caribou Space). In this role, she has provided strategy advisory to both the UK Space Agency and European Space Agency on their multi-year sustainable development programs—the International Partnerships Programme and Global Development Assistance. Through these programs, the agencies have funded the development of Earth Observation solutions to inform the climate resilience and sustainability decision-making in low- and middle-income countries. Nicki has been particularly interested to bridge the user communities within international financial institutions, NGOs and climate funds, with those using satellite data to generate insights that can deliver social and environmental impact.
Prior to joining Caribou, Nicki was part of a small team that founded the Global Innovation Fund, a $200-million impact-first investment fund focused on supporting scalable innovations that generate social impact for the world’s poorest. Nicki became Portfolio Director at GIF, coordinating non-financial support to the portfolio and hosting the Investment Committee. From 2012 to 2015, Nicki was Lead Advisor on Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the UK’s Department for International Development. She started her career as a strategy consultant, working on projects across the UK, France, Spain, Ghana, and Senegal in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. She holds a BA in modern languages from the University of Cambridge and an MA from the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex (UK). Nicki is based in the UK.
There is a general appetite for experimenting with new ways of doing things in development, and very few things generate as much excitement and hype in this sector as new technologies. My interest lies in understanding whether or not these new approaches genuinely lead to better outcomes for users and how those outcomes can be sustained and scaled over the longer term.
