News

Prof. Charles Simkins has passed away. Prof. Simkins, a South African was an African Economic Research Consortium’s (AERC) network member and renowned economist in the African continent. He was the first program director of the CPPA at University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Until his death, he was the head of research at Helen Suzman Foundation, a position he held for the last eight years. He was the inaugural holder of the Helen Suzman Chair in Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Charles joined the Helen Suzman Foundation in 2014 and succeeded in building up a research profile which has, over many years, regularly produced widely read (and quoted) research on a broad range of subjects topical to Africans: this included diverse subjects such as health and land reform, infrastructure problems (including water and electricity) and constitutional issues, especially those surrounding electoral reform. The essential thinking behind this research was to provide an educated African audience with concise background analyses on issues of general importance, with significantly more substance and rigour.

Quite apart from the quality of his work, he is remembered as someone who had the rare gift of combining an impressive academic background with a no-nonsense approach to analyzing complicated practical issues confronting the African society.

The late Prof. Simkins completed his bachelor’s degree at University of the Witwatersrand, and was then awarded a Rhodes scholarship, with which he obtained a MA (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford University. He later completed a PhD (Economics) at the University of Kwazulu Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. He will be deeply missed by the AERC
network.