Brice’s path into ESG was anything but conventional. After training as an engineer at UCT in the late 1980s, he became one of the first South Africans to explore cleaner production technologies. But it was a period of self-imposed exile in India, studying Sanskrit, living in the Himalayas, and serving as a monk, that gave him the philosophical grounding he still carries today.
That journey instilled in him both a reverence for systems thinking and a relentless curiosity about why societies and economies function the way they do. Returning to South Africa after the democratic transition, Brice was determined to apply that perspective to the business world.
On returning to South Africa after the dawn of democracy, he founded Environmental Business Strategies (EBS), later sold to Marsh in 2006. From there, Brice led environmental and social risk globally for Marsh, established the first environmental insurance JV with Hollard, and helped launch Grant Thornton’s sustainability unit. Eventually, he reconstituted EBS Advisory, later acquired by EY-Parthenon. In 2025, he left EY to join Vuna Partners, drawn by the opportunity to prove his theories of change from within a private equity platform.
Brice has consistently been at the forefront of ESG before it was fashionable. His work has spanned environmental insurance, sustainability consulting, and corporate responsibility leadership roles across industries as diverse as mining, financial services, and manufacturing.
Through it all, one golden thread runs through his life’s work: the belief that sustainability must be measured, valued, and embedded in core business strategy. Without robust data and clear financial linkages, he argues, ESG will remain in the realm of window-dressing and greenwashing.
Brice has long challenged companies to look “beyond the factory gate.” Monitoring and reporting on carbon within a business’s direct operations is not enough. The true test, he insists, is whether companies can measure and improve the lived realities of the communities and workers on which they depend.
He points to projects that prove this is possible, such as converting inner-city commercial buildings into residential housing, where reduced commutes and improved safety created measurable gains in gender security, productivity, and access to finance. For Brice, these are not just social wins, they are tangible value creators that reduce risk and unlock capital.
Too often, ESG is framed in terms of sacrifice or cost. Brice flips that narrative. “ESG isn’t about sacrifice,” he says.
“ESG is about abundance, unlocking upside the market has overlooked.”
In this, he echoes the ritings of C.K. Prahalad in "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". In it, Prahalad argues that multinational companies can make significant profits by serving the world's poorest consumers—the billions of people living on less than R50 a day—while simultaneously helping to eradicate poverty through market-based innovation.
Prahalad's theory flips traditional aid and business models on their head, suggesting that the massive, underserved population at the base of the global wealth pyramid represents an immense, untapped pool of purchasing power.
Brice is unsparing in his critique of the South African business model, which he argues was built on exploitation with underpaid labour on one side, overpriced goods and services on the other. The result, he says, is structural inefficiency, high absenteeism, and low productivity.
But Brice is not content to critique. At Vuna Partners, he is focused on building new models that align capital with transformation. He believes private equity, with its five-to-seven-year time horizons and active ownership model, is uniquely positioned to deliver this shift. By investing in SMEs, Vuna can drive skills transfer, expand the fiscal base, and directly impact the lives of workers who have too often been left behind.
“Private Equity is the only asset class investing in SME’s, and SME’s are the solution to South Africa’s unemployment and poverty”
For Brice, the missing link in moving sustainability from theory into practice is data. He argues that businesses have been disingenuous by focusing narrowly on what they can measure internally, rather than investing in ways to capture outcomes in the broader communities they affect.
“Measure the workers at their homes,” he says bluntly.
“Understand workers' levels of indebtedness, their quality of life, their opportunities for progression. That’s where you’ll see the real correlation with productivity, engagement, and ultimately financial performance.”
Ultimately, Brice believes the asset owners such as pension funds and institutional investors, hold the keys to change. Their fiduciary duty, he argues, is not just to deliver future financial security for their members, but to ensure that members retire into societies that function, with jobs, clinics, schools, and infrastructure intact. That, in his view, makes ESG not a “nice-to-have,” but part of the core responsibility of trustees and fund managers.
So why Vuna? For Brice, the answer lies in trust and alignment. Having known Vuna’s founders for years, he saw in them a rare combination of integrity, entrepreneurial drive, and a willingness to go beyond token transformation. At Vuna, he has found the operational platform to test his theories of change from the inside, and the patient capital to pursue them at scale.
Brice brings both philosophical depth and hard-nosed financial analysis to Vuna’s mission. For investors and LPs, that means more than an ESG “tick box.” It means a partner who believes true sustainability is not a cost of doing business, it is the only way to ensure long-term value creation in South Africa and beyond.