User Profile

Co-Founder, Botanican

Joy Olivier is a social entrepreneur working in education, healthcare and agriculture. All her work is focused on redressing inequality and injustice; promoting equal access to quality education and opportunities. Joy is the co-founder of botanican, a social enterprise leveraging medicinal cannabis to alleviate poverty in Lesotho and South Africa. She co-founded IkamvaYouth in 2003, and worked as executive director for the organisation for 15 years. She also chairs the board of the Future Farmers foundation. Joy has freelanced as a researcher, project manager, open educational resource developer, writer and editor in a range of projects with civil society, government and higher education partners. Joy is a 2018 Yale World Fellow, and an Ashoka Fellow, and has won a number of national, regional and international awards for her work with IkamvaYouth. She has an honours degree in Psychology and a Master’s degree in Education and ICT from The University of Cape Town. She is a Fellow of the eleventh class of the Africa Leadership Initiative - South Africa and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.