Kindly RSVP by 28 March 2012

Venues in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town (Videoconferencing facilities: see below)
Date: Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Time: 09:45 for 10:00 to 12:00

Prof Thandika Mkandawire has written and published extensively on the role of African intellectuals; social policy in a development context; African perspectives on structural adjustment; Africa's re-industrialisation; aid, accountability and democracy; and transformative social policy in developing countries.

Since 1975, Prof Mkandawire's writing has explored some of Africas greatest social, political and developmental challenges ranging from the practices of development and wage employment in six African countries for the International Institute for Labour Studies in Geneva (1975), to theoretical and practical issues arising from capital goods, accumulation and technological change in Africa for the International Labour Organisation (1981), to the economic experience of 30 years of independence in Africa, and the political economy of privatisation in Africa in the 1990s.

Prof Mkandawire began his career as a journalist in his native Malawi in 1960, where he was assistant editor of the Malawi News until 1962. He has taught at the Universities of Zimbabwe and Stockholm, and holds a Doctorate in Letters from Rhodes University.

Prof Mkandawire sits on the editorial board of several prestigious academic publications including the Journal of Human Development, the Journal of Higher Education in Africa, Oxford Development Studies, and Feminist Economics.

He is the former Director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and was formerly Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), based in Dakar, Senegal, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen and has taught at the Universities of Stockholm and Zimbabwe.

He currently holds the Olof Palme Professor for Peace with the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm, and is the first person to take on the new position of Chair in African Development at the London School of Economics (LSE).