The title “professor” is the pinnacle of academic achievement. Yet there is a peak above that which few academics scale. One of these rare high-flyers is Prof Ingrid Woolard, the first at Stellenbosch University to be awarded an honorary professorship at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Woolard will be chair of the economics of poverty & inequality section of Groningen’s department of economics, econometrics & finance for five years. She says: “[The university] saw the need for more work on Africa … [and for] opportunities for its students to work on this continent” — specifically on data about African poverty and inequality, Woolard’s area of study.
On the heels of this honour, Sussex Business School in the UK recruited Woolard. She will be executive dean later this year. She is also the dean of the faculty of economic & management sciences at Stellenbosch.
She sees her move to Sussex as an opportunity for South African research to contribute to international scholarship, and vice versa. “Sussex is No 1 in the world for development studies,” she says. “It is very much about policy orientation. It brings in more research income than any other business school in the UK. So it is outward focused and targeted at the exchange of knowledge. This is an opportunity to find … global connections.”
Such research, Woolard says, can help create an enabling environment for business to be the engine of growth.
Woolard was a member of the Davis tax committee from 2013 until it concluded its work in 2018. Past roles include being chair of the employment conditions commission and a consultant for the South African government, the World Bank, the International Labour Organisation and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development. Since 2007 she has been a co-principal investigator of the long-running National Income Dynamics Study, South Africa’s household panel survey.
Woolard’s extraordinary milestones mark a career that began with South Africa’s transition to democracy.
She grew up in Durban and earned a BSc in mathematical statistics & economics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a BA (Hons) in economics from Unisa. She briefly studied actuarial science at the University of Cape Town (UCT) — and had her eyes opened.
She says: “I was taught by Francis Wilson,” referring to the late author of groundbreaking research into the conditions of farmworkers in 1971 and mineworkers in 1972. “Francis painted a picture of what the migrant labour system looks like, what the circumstances are in which people live.”
Such research can help create an enabling environment for business to be the engine of growth
— Ingrid Woolard
In 1994 Woolard worked directly with Wilson, who had been tasked with running “the first living standards measurement survey for the incoming government”, Woolard says. “Sort of a baseline survey to try to get a picture of what South Africa looked like at the time of the transition. It helped to set the standard for the government’s work.”
Woolard then began PhD studies at UCT, using this data. Her thesis on the measurement of poverty and inequality was “some of the earliest work in South Africa about [getting a] proper measurement of poverty”, she says. The previous separate homeland policy meant that earlier data was “very patchy”.
Extraordinary choices run in her family. Her paternal grandmother defied convention to study pharmacy at Groningen in the 1920s. To qualify, she taught herself Greek and Latin — subjects that were not on offer at the traditional girls’ school she attended. Though this grandmother did not pursue a career in pharmacy, Woolard says, “she was this incredibly strong, very impressive woman” who spoke seven languages. “She still rode her bicycle at the age of 90.”
Woolard says her grandmother’s aunt studied paediatrics at Groningen in the 1880s. “So,” she says, “she would have been of that very first cohort” that followed in the footsteps of Aletta Jacobs, who was the first woman doctor to graduate in the Netherlands and the first woman to obtain a PhD degree. Jacobs shattered the gender barrier in 1871 and buildings in Groningen have been named after her.
Woolard’s paternal grandfather, an economist, brought his family to South Africa in 1950 and joined the government agency that was the precursor to the department of trade & industry. Her father’s brother, Jaap Meijer, was deputy governor of the Reserve Bank from 1991 to 1996.
“And now my daughter’s just finished her honours degree in economics here at Stellenbosch,” Woolard says. Her husband is a chief researcher of chemistry at Stellenbosch and her son is studying towards a BSc degree in AI.
For Woolard, it’s all part of a life focused on growth.
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