Spotlight

After twenty-two months as Executive Director of SALDRU, Reza Daniels will be stepping down from the role. In this farewell message Reza reflects on the SALDRU's accomplishments and achievements over the period.

The Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) and Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA) are pleased to invite you to the 2025 December Workshop on Frontiers in Applied Economics for Developing Countries.

The University of Cape Town invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship position funded through the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and National Research Foundation's (NRF) South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI).

SALDRU has entered into an exciting three-year collaboration with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) to support the next generation of African researchers working at the intersection of education and demography

To honour the legacy of Francis Wilson (1939–2022), DataFirst awards two annual prizes of R10 000 each for outstanding research that makes innovative use of publicly available data.

In March this year, with the support of the UNU-Wider Southern Africa – Towards Inclusive Development (SA-TIED) programme, in which the National Treasury and the SA Revenue Service are partners, SALDRU relaunched the Econ3x3 website.

The complex dynamics of socio-economic inequalities in Africa are being spotlighted in a series of hybrid seminars that SALDRU and the  African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research have been hosting since mid-August.

In this article for The Conversation, Lauren Graham from the CSDA at the University of Johannesburg and Ariane De Lannoy from SALDRU reflect on what youth need to break the cycle of unemployment.

The lead article this month highlights research being done within the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research, which interrogates measurement issues in multidimensional poverty frameworks in African countries.

Youth development actors of the National Pathway Management Network (NPMN) have launched the SA Youth Ecosystem Campaign to unite the diverse players in the youth development ecosystem. SALDRU leads sub-committee 2 of the NPMN.

SALDRU researchers in the South Africa node of the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) have developed a new course on the analysis of panel surveys.

Ariane De Lannoy and SALDRU’s Youth and Social Policy team co-hosted the Youth Month Webinar Series which was held by the Centre for Social Development in Africa (CSDA) at the University of Johannesburg in June 2025.

SALDRU will be jointly hosting a strategic event with the National Business Initiative focused on building a Just Energy Transition (JET) through skills development, localisation, and labour market reform on the 31st of July.

Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA) and the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) are pleased to announce a two-day workshop. It will be hosted 8 & 9 December 2025, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

In this article Ariane De Lannoy reflects on what the Quarterly Labour Force Survey Data tells us about young people who remain disconnected from education and employment and how these findings relate to the lived realitie of young people.

SALDRU had a very strong presence at the AIDSImpact Conference, which was held in Casablanca from the 26th to the 28th of May, 2025. Dr Brendan Maughan-Brown presented five oral presentations and chaired a session.

SALDRU invites applications to the below two one-week Stata training courses to be held at the University of Cape Town in July 2025. Applications close on 23 June 2025.

In this article, Amy Thornton describes how she and Jacqueline Mosomi showed that the shock in demand for at-home childcare triggered by the Covid-19 lockdowns affected women’s paid work hours more negatively than men’s.

Effective community-level development requires granular insights into well-being disparities. The Community Explorer is an interactive online platform designed to map, analyse, and visualise community-level well-being data in South Africa

The Basic Package of Support (BPS), designed as an integrated, youth-responsive intervention to tackle the various barriers faced by young people, has just launched its first tracer study.