Prof Kevin Wall is an extraordinary professor at the Department of Construction Economics and was conferred with an honorary doctorate at the 2023 autumn graduation ceremony.  Prof Wall is a civil engineering and town planner and also a fellow of the South African Academy of Engineering and past president of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE).  He has received both the SAICE Gold Medal, the highest honour that the civil engineering profession can bestow in South Africa, and the Lifetime Award of the National Science and Technology Forum, the highest honour that can be bestowed by the science, engineering and technology community. 

Until 2022, Prof Wall was a non-executive board member of the Ekurhuleni Water Care Company, which takes care of the wastewater of the industrial heartland of Gauteng.  He has served on several other municipal entities’ boards and was deputy chairperson of the Council of King Hintsa Technical and Vocational Education and Training College.

Much of his work over the last two decades has focused on the effectiveness of government spending on infrastructure and ways to improve the quality, reliability and sustainability of that infrastructure.  In this respect, he led the research team for the four SAICE “report cards” on the infrastructure condition in South Africa (2006, 2011, 2017 and 2022) and drafted the National Infrastructure Maintenance Strategy, which Cabinet approved.  Since leaving the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as a built environment fellow, he has consulted widely.  Recent appointments included:  infrastructure advisor to a branch of the Treasury, member of a team evaluating the Government Technical Advisory Centre, and capital programme and project appraisal for the German foreign aid agency GIZ and (of facilities sector planning) the City of Cape Town.  He researches and publishes extensively, usually on topics related to enabling engineering and service delivery to take place rather than on engineering itself.