SPEAKERS
Pranish Desai is a senior data analyst at Good Governance Africa, a research and advocacy organization headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work at GGA focuses on the issues of subnational governance in Southern Africa, political accountability, coalition politics in South Africa and encouraging data-driven policymaking within the region. Pranish is an incoming doctoral student at MIT.
Daniel de Kadt works as an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, where he is an affiliate of the Data Science Institute and a senior visiting fellow in government. Prior to this he worked at the University of California, Merced, after completing his PhD at MIT. He has written extensively on the electoral politics of South Africa.
Rorisang Lekalake is a senior analyst/methodologist for Afrobarometer, charged with contributing to the organization’s analytical outputs, strengthening existing methodologies, and contributing to building the capacity of network staff and partners in quantitative research methods and analysis. She is a 2023 PhD recipient from MIT.
Lwanda Maqwelane, a PhD candidate at Rhodes University, is an early career research activist with a focus on policy development, just energy transitions and climate change education. She currently serves as a researcher at the Center for Researching Education and Labour at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
MODERATOR
Evan Lieberman is the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa and the director of the MIT Center for International Studies. He also directs the Global Diversity Lab (GDL) and MIT’s global experiential learning program, MISTI. His most recent book is Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa after Apartheid (Princeton University Press, 2022).
