Esther Rao | CFO
WWF-KENYA

Esther Rao, FCCA Chief Financial Officer, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-Kenya) Esther Rao is a Regional Finance Leader with over 13 years of experience shaping financial strategy across Africa's non-profit and conservation sector. As Chief Financial Officer of WWF-Kenya, she sits at the frontline of strategy for one of the continent's leading conservation organisations, guiding financial sustainability, driving operational excellence across the organisation, and shaping strategic direction at board level. She is also a non-executive director at OXFAM Kenya.  Her career includes over three years providing regional financial oversight across multiple African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Malawi, and South Sudan, at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), where she led and built the capacity of finance teams operating across vastly different regulatory, cultural, and operational environments. That experience gives her a grounded, practical understanding of what it takes to build and manage finance talent across borders in complex African markets. As a CFO with more than a decade in the conservation space of the not-for-profit sector, Esther offers private sector finance leaders a rare vantage point on sustainability. In her world, mission and margin are never separate conversations; every financial decision is made in service of long term environmental and organisational impact. She brings this integrated mindset to the conversation on how CFOs can move sustainability out of the cost centre and into the centre of value creation. A Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and holder of an MCom in Strategic Management from Strathmore Business School, Esther is speaking on managing finance talent across borders in multi-country African markets, and joins a CFO panel exploring how sustainability is being reframed from a cost centre into a driver of margin and long term value.