Alison Gillwald is the Director of Research ICT Africa, a 20 African-country ICT policy and regulatory research network which is now hosted by The EDGE Institute in Johannesburg and funded by the International Development Research Council (IDRC). She has been responsible for raising funds and directing this multi-million rand project with the purpose of developing on the continent the data and analysis necessary for evidence-based ICT policy and effective regulation. The programme, now in its seventh year, covers countries in North, South, East and West Africa. She also convenes an ICT policy and regulatory executive training course in the Management Programme in Infrastructure Reform and Regulation, University of Cape Town, Graduate School of Business.
Prior to this Gillwald was until 2008 Associate Professor at the Witwatersrand University Graduate School of Public and Development Management, where she founded the Learning Information Networking and Knowledge (LINK) Centre in 1999 with the purposes of fast tracking ICT policy and regulatory training in Southern Africa. From the initial start up of the programme with an executive professional certificate, the Centre is now responsible for a full Masters in ICT Policy and Regulation at the Graduate School of Public & Development Management at Witwatersrand University and has trained hundreds of policy makers, regulators and operators across the continent
Prior to joining Wits she was appointed by the President on the recommendation of Parliament to serve on the founding Council of the South African Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (SATRA). The body was responsible for the implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which introduced a dedicated sector regulator in South Africa for the first time and opened up the mobile telecommunications market. Before that she was responsible for establishing the Policy Department in the first independent broadcasting regulator, the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Her time there was spent primarily on co-ordinating and preparing the report of the Triple Inquiry into the viability of public broadcasting, local content and cross media ownership.
In 1994 she was appointed to the Advisory Board of the Independent Media Commission, which was responsible for ensuring equitable coverage of political parties by the media in the first democratic elections. In 2000 she was appointed to the African Communication Ministers’ Advisory Group headed by the then South African Minister of Communications and in 2002 she was appointed by the Minister to chair the South African Digital Broadcasting Advisory Body. In 2005 she was appointed by the President through a public nomination process overseen by Parliament to the board of the public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and was reappointed to serve in 2008.
She has provided technical assistance to the South African converged regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) on local content and under-serviced area telecommunications licensing. In addition, she has also provided technical assistance to the Competition Commission on anti-competitive practice disputes and on mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications sector. She was responsible for the 10-year review of economic regulation of the telecommunications sector commissioned by the Presidency and has conducted research for the Department of Finance (Treasury) on regulated prices in infrastructure industries.
Gillwald was nominated to and served on the founding Task Force on Gender Issues of the International Telecommunications Union and was commissioned by the ITU as part of an international study on broadband. She also developed and delivered a training programme for telecommunications regulators for the ITU together with the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation. She has conducted research on improving the participation of developing countries in international fora for the UK Department of International Development and for the South African Department of Trade and Industry for World Trade Organisation (WTO) telecommunications negotiations. Over the last decade she has presented papers at international meetings in these organisations and at the World Intellectual Property Rights Organisation (WIPO). She has also led an international team to conduct a gap analysis of ICT policy and regulatory capacity, training and technical expertise in the African Pacific and Caribbean (APC) for infoDev. She has served as scientific advisor to UNDESA for the Pan African Parliament meeting on the Role of Parliamentarians in the Development of an Equitable Information Society, in Kigali, Rwanda.
She is editor of the Southern African Journal of Information and Communication, a Department of Education accredited journal, which she founded in 2000 and is published in the areas of telecommunications and broadcasting policy and regulation, gender and politics more broadly. Gillwald has a Masters degree in Politics from the University of Natal, which examined democratic media policy for South Africa and she has submitted her doctoral thesis on a decade of telecommunication reform for conferral from Witwatersrand University. She also has a post-graduate certificate in Economics and Public Finance from UNISA.
