Spotlight | Southern Africa Labour & Development Research Unit

SALDRU Data Wrangling with Stata 2024 Course

SALDRU is hosting an in-person course Data Wrangling in Stata: How to manage your empirical research project from 8-19 July at the University of Cape Town.

Invitation: Francis Wilson Memorial Lecture

UCT, SALDRU and DataFirst invite you to the second annual Francis Wilson Memorial Lecture on 16 April 2024 at 18:00 SAST.

2024 Francis Wilson Memorial Lecture

The second annual Francis Wilson Memorial Lecture was delivered by former Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel. The title was “How to build – and break – a capable state: structural reform and institution building in the democratic era".

Call for Applications: Postdoctoral and PhD Fellowships in Demography, Human Capital, and Sustainable Development

SALDRU, in collaboration with IIASA, invite applications for three postdoctoral fellowships and three PhD scholarships in the field of demography, human capital, and sustainable development.

Participants at the consultation workshop of the Namibian Inequality Diagnostic report

ACEIR presents Namibia Inequality Diagnostic at ILO event in Windhoek

For several months now, ACEIR has been working on a Namibian Inequality Diagnostic report.

Participants at the inaugural SALDRU December Workshop.

Inaugural edition of the SALDRU December Workshop

A note on South Africa’s second Presidential Economic Advisory Council

Murray Leibbrandt receives an honorary doctorate from the University of the Free State

South Africa at 30 Years of Democracy: A Conference hosted by SALDRU

This conference will be hosted from 2-4 April in the Kramer Law Building on UCT middle campus and reflect on South Africa's journey since the establishment of democracy, 30 years ago.

Basic Package of Support: way forward, and a Tracer Study

Advancing women in economics education, teaching, and research in South Africa: Progress and potential

SALDRU and the African Leadership Initiative host pre-SA@30 years of democracy conference policy dialogue

In November 2024, SALDRU and ALI hosted the first of our three policy dialogues leading up to the upcoming SA@30 conference. This dialogue was titled: "What sacred policy cows need to be revisited to unlock South Africa’s potential?”

How to challenge a corrupt system

In this piece for D+C Development and Cooperation Magazine, Fabio Andres Diaz Pabon, together with Hafte Gebrihet raise the importance of enabling and supporting those fighting corruption ...

Assessing the health and sociological impacts of a Basic Income Grant

As part of SALDRU’s mission to reduce inequalities through policy-relevant research, we have led many studies of the social protection system in South Africa, including various social grants.

Image credit: jeremiapietersen on Pixabay.

SALDRU December Workshop 2024

SALDRU will be hosting a new annual workshop, the SALDRU December Workshop: Frontiers in applied economics for developing countries.

African Foundational Learning Data Hub

Housed at DataFirst, Africa’s only internationally accredited open research data repository, AFLEARN builds on SALDRU and DataFirst’s long history of data scholarship and capacity building across the continent.

CoRE IPD Summer School

Building on the momentum of the Wealth Data Science Summer School, SALDRU researchers Murray Leibbrandt and Muna Shifa taught short courses on inequality and poverty analysis at the launch summer school of the CoRE IPD.

Martin Wittenberg: an intellectual giant who brought home inequality’s dwarves 1962-2024

SALDRU mourns the loss of Martin Wittenberg, who passed away at the end of July 2024. Martin was the Director of DataFirst for 13 years and was a University of Cape Town School of Economics Associate of SALDRU.

Images: Attendees of the Wealth Data Science Summer school in Cape Town. Credit: Haajirah Esau.

Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis to uncover the structuring of social class and privilege

The African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) recently partnered with the Constructor University in Bremen, Germany on their Wealth Data Science Summer School.

Image credit: Matthew Henry on Unsplash.

Less load shedding? Fewer deaths

Joshua Budlender, a Postdoctoral Fellow in SALDRU, shares some key features of his investigation into the effects of load shedding on mortality in South Africa, focusing on Cape Town.

Summer school on African inequalities starts an ambitious Africa-Europe research collaboration

Close to 40 early career researchers are in for a treat in the second week of July when they attend the inaugural summer school of the Cluster of Research Excellence in Inequalities, Poverty, and Deprivation (CoRE-IPD).

The impact of systemic shocks on South Africa’s development – a complexity approach in a context of global disorder

We are simultaneously experiencing a shift in global power, the growing strength of artificial intelligence, and climate shocks.

More than a just transition

South Africa is one of the largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting countries due to its heavy reliance on coal for most of its energy needs.