Speaker > Biography

Leigh Meinert

Co-Founder and Managing Director
Tertiary School in Business Administration (TSiBA)
Cape Town

Since the first democratic elections when Leigh was fifteen years old, she has committed herself to participating in the transformation of South Africa by working with emerging leaders. So earnest was her passion for working with her peers across diverse backgrounds that she left school halfway through Standard 9 to start an NGO called Youth With Vision, taught herself the last eighteen months of her schooling in four and enrolled at Stellenbosch University at the age of sixteen to study a programme in holistic leadership.

Whilst studying she ran her own Accelerated Learning Centre teaching learning and life skills and since then she has convened young people from around the world at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, worked as a strategic project facilitator in the corporate environment, facilitated the Brightest Young Minds conference for four years, coached local and international leaders and started her own career services company to help young people transition into the working world.

In 2002 Leigh pursued her passion to Johannesburg where she coordinated strategic projects for CIDA City Campus, South Africa’s first virtually free university. Together with three colleagues, she co-founded the Tertiary School in Business Administration (TSiBA) a private, not-for-profit higher education institution in 2004. She was appointed as managing director in September 2006.

Leigh holds a BA degree in Value and Policy Studies from the University of Stellenbosch and a postgraduate diploma in coaching from Middlesex University in the UK. Her work has been recognised by the President’s International Marketing Council who invited her to author the chapter on ‘Future Leaders’ for the book ‘South Africa: More Good News’ and the Mail and Guardian newspaper who nominated her as one of the country’s “Top 100 Young People” in 2006 and 2007.

She currently serves as a non-executive director of the Academy of Management and Leadership (AMAL) in Pakistan, a founding member of the Institute of Mindfulness South Africa (IMISA) and a council member of the Unitarian Church of Cape Town.