With a background in Industrial Psychology, Social Entrepreneurship and the Sciences, Annie McWalter joined The Hope Factory as Deputy CEO, to continue her passion to help address one of South Africa's most challenging problems: that of high failure rate of South African businesses.

Annie has years of experience in training, coaching and mentorship of small business owners and has studied and documented South African entrepreneurial role models such as Herman Mashaba. She also co-founded and ran a small consulting company focussing on development best-practice and Enterprise Development and Socio Economic Development.

Annie has senior management and vast experience within the Corporate Social Responsibility field. As head of research at the NGO called Heartlines, she contributed to the strategic development of community building programmes and designed the research, monitoring and evaluation systems for measuring social impact. With The Business Place, an NGO network of entrepreneurial walk-in centres set up under Investec's Entrepreneurial Development Trust, she was National Training Manager where she devised and coordinated all the accredited entrepreneurship and business mentor development programmes.