After Karen Kammeraat graduated from her study Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, she started working in the sector of economic development in developing countries and emerging economies. Her mission is to contribute to a fair and decent income for everyone worldwide. She has been employed by the Center for Imports from Developing countries (CBI, now part of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency RVO) and Oxfam Novib. For two years she lived in Tanzania and worked as a consultant for international organisations such as the Netherlands Embassy, DFID and GIZ. In 2010 she became the programme director of Yente Foundation, an organisation that worked on empowering women entrepreneurs. Later she worked as Projects Officer at WageIndicator Foundation, an organisation that shares information about wages and labour laws in more than 80 countries.

In 2014 it all came together when she, with Yvette van Dok, initiated the Brilliant Entrepreneur programme. This entails training and business missions for small and medium sized women entrepreneurs from all sectors. The programme integrates personal and business development as it starts from the assumption that as an entrepreneur you are your company, so it is important to use your capacity and talents to the maximum. Since every entrepreneur is different, the approach is very individual and tailormade. The programme has proven to be very successful and impressive results were booked by the participants. In the less than two years that the programme is running, 160 SME women entrepreneurs participated, from Uganda, Zimbabwe, Eastern Europe, Jordan, Palestine and a number of other MENA countries.

At the same time Karen Kammeraat also creates awareness in the Netherlands among consumers about the conditions under which products are made and shows them how they can make a positive contribution to poverty reduction by paying attention to what they buy. For this she created the FairShopping Foundation (www.eerlijkwinkelen.nl, in Dutch) and also gave a TEDx Talk about the subject, which can be watched here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pGFkPQgUlI