Mentorship and training are key to enhancing skills, fostering collaboration, increasing research and data uptake, strengthening institutions, and empowering the next generation of scholars, and form a key component of the Siyaphambili initiative.

In the past, we have partnered with DataFirst to offer training in longitudinal data management and analysis using the South African National Income Dynamics Study. Under our project funded by G2LM|LIC, we designed a course on the use of panel data in practice, using the Ghanaian Socioeconomic Panel Survey as the primary data source. Read more about the course, conducted in July 2025, here. The course can be conducted on request and is intended to be rerun in July 2026 as part of the Cluster of Research Excellence in Inequalities, Poverty and Deprivation (CoRE-IPD) summer school.

Several graduates have been supervised by members of the team (theses below). Kauthar Hoossen (supervised by Emma Whitelaw) and Sandra Oguntimirin (supervised by Nicola Branson and Haroon Moolla) are completing their honours and master’s theses on related topics.

Ressom, H. (2025). Intergenerational mobility in South Africa: how much has South Africa changed since the early 1990s?. PhD thesis. Faculty of Commerce, School of Economics, University of Cape Town.

Whitelaw, E. (2023). Post-school education in an unequal society. PhD thesis. Faculty of Commerce, School of Economics, University of Cape Town.

Culligan, S. (2022). Using Census, Institutional and Geospatial Data to Estimate the Socio-Economic Profile of Post-School Students by Institutional Type. Master’s thesis. Faculty of Commerce, School of Economics, University of Cape Town.

Kahn, A. (2020). Analysing the role of language in the context of education, employment and income in South Africa. PhD thesis. Faculty of Commerce, School of Economics, University of Cape Town.

Smith, L. (2012). The effect of selected academic development programmes on the academic performance of academic development students at a South African university: An empirical study. PhD thesis. Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment. University of Cape Town.

If you are interested in developing your dissertation within any of our projects or themes, please email us nicola.branson@uct.ac.za or emma.whitelaw@uct.ac.za.