Mimi Kalinda
Global communications expert helping leaders use storytelling to inspire action, build trust and create lasting impact.
Why you should book Mimi Kalinda for your next event
- Learn how powerful storytelling strengthens leadership, builds trust and inspires teams, stakeholders and customers to take meaningful action.
- Gain practical insights from a communications expert with 28+ years of experience advising global brands, institutions and governments.
- Discover how strategic communication can strengthen reputation, navigate change and deliver measurable business and social impact.
Non-binding request for Mimi Kalinda
Global communications strategist, storytelling expert and leadership advisor.
With more than 28 years of international experience, Mimi Kalinda has helped some of the world's most influential organizations communicate with greater purpose, inspire action and strengthen their impact. From advising Fortune 500 companies and global development institutions to coaching senior executives and entrepreneurs, she combines strategic communications expertise with the transformative power of storytelling. Her engaging keynotes equip leaders with practical tools to communicate with confidence, build trust and create meaningful change in their organizations and beyond.
Book Mimi Kalinda for your event
When you book Mimi Kalinda, you invite one of the world's most experienced voices in strategic communications, storytelling and leadership to your stage. Across nearly three decades, she has advised multinational corporations, governments, global foundations and entrepreneurs on how communication becomes a catalyst for growth, influence and measurable results.
Her experience stretches across Africa, Europe and the United States, giving her a unique international perspective on leadership, reputation management and stakeholder engagement. Whether addressing executives, business leaders or public sector organizations, Mimi delivers practical insights that audiences can immediately apply to strengthen their communication, leadership and organizational impact.
Her presentations combine strategic thinking with real-world examples drawn from an exceptional international career, making every keynote both inspiring and actionable.
A career shaping global communications
Mimi Kalinda is the co-founder of Africa Communications Media Group (ACG), a leading pan-African public relations and communications agency headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa. Since launching the company in 2012, she has helped organizations communicate effectively across Sub-Saharan Africa while managing complex communications strategies for clients operating on a global scale.
Throughout her career, she has worked with an impressive portfolio of organizations, including:
- MTN Group
- Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP)
- Roche Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics
- Wikimedia Foundation
- ONE Campaign
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- African Development Bank (AfDB)
- Ethiopian Airlines
- Barloworld
- IFC / The World Bank
- Mastercard Foundation
- HID Global
- African Innovation Summit
- Western Union
- Lloyds
- Dalberg Advisors
- AFIG Funds
- USAID
- Nesta
- African Union
- Mercedes
She has also led global communications for Innovations for Poverty Action, the Bezos Earth Fund's energy portfolio and the Global Development Incubator in Washington, DC.
This breadth of experience enables her to speak with authority about communicating across cultures, managing diverse stakeholders and creating communication strategies that deliver measurable outcomes.
Storytelling that drives leadership
At the heart of Mimi's work is a simple but powerful belief: great leaders are great storytellers.
She is the founder of Storytelling and Leadership, a professional development platform designed to help executives, entrepreneurs and managers master storytelling as a leadership skill. Rather than viewing storytelling as a presentation technique, Mimi demonstrates how it becomes a strategic leadership capability that strengthens culture, builds trust, inspires teams and influences decision-making.
She is also the author of Echoes of Influence, a book created for leaders at every level who want to harness storytelling to drive transformation and achieve meaningful organizational impact.
Her keynote presentations explore how leaders can:
- communicate vision with greater clarity
- inspire employees during change
- build stronger organizational cultures
- create authentic connections with stakeholders
- strengthen influence without relying solely on authority
- communicate complex ideas in memorable ways
Audiences leave with practical communication tools that can immediately improve leadership effectiveness.
Award-winning communications expertise
Mimi's expertise has been recognised throughout her career through award-winning campaigns and high-profile international projects.
She contributed to national branding initiatives including Ethiopia's country branding efforts and the Invest in Morocco campaign. During her time as Africa Lead for FleishmanHillard, she helped deliver PRISM Award-winning campaigns including Barclays Africa's "Prosper" campaign and the African Union's Ebola awareness campaign, which raised more than USD 51 million.
She also led crisis communications efforts for MTN across 45 markets, providing invaluable experience in reputation management, leadership under pressure and strategic crisis response.
Earlier in her career, she worked at Weber Shandwick managing social impact accounts such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Innovation Prize for Africa. As Global Director of Communications for the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), she played an integral role in launching the internationally recognised Next Einstein Forum (NEF).
From 2003 to 2006, Mimi worked in New York for Spike Lee's production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, contributing to the film Inside Man. She also held marketing roles supporting major American television networks including HBO, Showtime, Lifetime and Oxygen.
Her work has also been recognised with the One World Media Award for Rien Que La Vérité, a television programme promoting HIV/AIDS prevention and ending violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Trusted advisor to leaders worldwide
Alongside her keynote speaking, Mimi coaches senior executives and delivers workshops for organizations seeking to strengthen leadership through communication.
She has worked with leading institutions including the Gates Foundation, Mastercard Foundation, LinkedIn, the University of Oxford, the Obama Foundation Leaders: Africa programme, Absa Bank, the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) and the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business.
She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at IE University in Madrid, where she helps develop the next generation of global business leaders.
Beyond her professional work, Mimi contributes to numerous influential boards and advisory groups. She serves on the board of the AKO Caine Prize and Catalyst for Growth (C4G), an initiative launched by JP Morgan and Dalberg to support African entrepreneurs. She also advises Africa Works Ventures on investment opportunities connecting China and Africa and is a member of the Africa Brand Counsel, where she supports policymakers and private sector leaders in strengthening Africa's global reputation and brand equity.
In 2024, she was appointed Executive Board Member of the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF), a specialised agency of the African Union dedicated to strengthening capacity development across the African continent.
Booking Mimi Kalinda means giving your audience practical strategies, global perspectives and inspiring stories from a communications leader who has spent her career helping organizations and individuals influence with authenticity, lead with purpose and create lasting impact.
Keynotes
Keynote by Mimi Kalinda:
The Power of Storytelling
This keynote explores how stories shape how people think, decide, and act within organizations and markets.
Audiences gain a deeper understanding of why narrative is central to trust, influence, and alignment, and how intentional storytelling can be used to cut through complexity, humanize communication, and drive meaningful business outcomes.
The session blends insight with practical frameworks that can immediately be applied across leadership, brand, and internal communication.
Keynote by Mimi Kalinda:
Leadership Narrative: Communicating with Clarity and Impact
Leadership is fundamentally a communication discipline.
This keynote explores how leaders can develop and use their personal and organizational narrative to build trust, inspire confidence and create alignment.
It goes beyond presentation skills to focus on how leaders shape meaning through what they say and how they say it.
Audiences gain insight into how to communicate with greater authenticity, navigate complexity and lead in a way that people understand, believe and follow.
Keynote by Mimi Kalinda:
Executive Storytelling in High Stakes Moments
Moments of change, uncertainty or pressure place extraordinary demands on leadership communication.
This keynote focuses on how executives can use storytelling to lead effectively when the stakes are high.
It explores how to communicate difficult messages with clarity, maintain credibility under pressure, and create a sense of direction when it matters most.
The session provides a structured approach to crafting narratives that balance honesty, empathy and authority in critical moments.
Keynote by Mimi Kalinda:
Building a Narrative Driven Organization
What does it mean to embed storytelling into the fabric of an organization?
This keynote explores how narrative can move beyond communication and become a core strategic capability. It examines how organizations can align leadership, culture and strategy through a shared narrative approach, creating consistency, engagement and momentum.
Audiences leave with a clearer understanding of how to build an environment where storytelling is not occasional, but foundational to how the organization operates and grows.
Keynote by Mimi Kalinda:
From Strategy to Story: Turning Vision into Narrative
Even the best strategies fail when they are not understood or embraced.
This keynote addresses the gap between strategy creation and strategy adoption by showing how to translate complex ideas into clear human centered narratives.
It explores how storytelling can make strategy tangible, memorable and actionable, enabling teams to see their role within the bigger picture.
Books by Mimi Kalinda
Talking to AfricaConsidering Culture in Communications for a Complex Continentby Mimi Kalinda
