Joanna Grotte

Joanna holds a PhD in Economics (UCT). She has been a member of the SALDRU team since doing her masters’ thesis under the supervision of Murray Leibbrandt in 2011. In 2018 Jo joined the SALDRU youth research team. Her expertise in the development of multi-dimensional indices meant that she could take the existing Youth Multi-dimensional Poverty (MPI) work to the next stage. She also joined the Youth Explorer team, which in its latest developments, is becoming a leading planning platform for policy-makers at the highest national policy level. Jo has taken on a project-management role, overseeing the data analysis side of the work, as well as the service mapping at various geographical levels. SALDRU also now coordinates the Youth Explorer work to match the demands and needs of the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative, as well as the Basic Package of Support. A growing aspect of this work is the curation of a national youth services database, which will service numerous policy planners and organisations working to improve the outcomes of young people.

In her academic research work, Jo is working on publishing two papers from her PhD thesis, and has joined the Basic Package of Support monitoring and evaluation team. Jo also convenes the popular SALDRU course, Introduction to Household Survey Data Analysis, using Stata.