Catherine Duggan

Dr Catherine Duggan has been appointed as the new director of the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) effective from 1 September 2020.

Dr Duggan is an accomplished academic who brings more than 20 years of work in Africa, as well as extensive experience at top global business schools, to the role. She joins UCT from the African Leadership University School of Business (ALUSB) in Rwanda, where she is currently the vice dean for strategy and research. At ALUSB she spearheaded the development of a highly successful new Master of Business Administration programme that blends online and in-person learning and draws students from more than 15 African countries each year. She also chaired the school’s expanding executive education and continuous learning activities and served as faculty lead for its business development and student recruitment activities.

Before joining ALUSB, Dr Duggan served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School (HBS), where she taught courses on political economy and leadership in the MBA and executive education programmes. She was a visiting scholar at Saïd Business School at Oxford University, where she taught a popular course on Doing Business in Africa. Dr Duggan has also taught in executive programmes for INSEAD Business School, recently serving as academic co-chair of a joint ALUSB-INSEAD executive programme on Strategic Leadership in Africa.

Dr Duggan’s expertise focuses on institutional development and financial sector regulation in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on the ways that countries can build institutions to support economic development. She has written numerous cases on business in Africa, including cases based on original research in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau, spanning topics as varied as environmental sustainability, social enterprise, the changing role of business in society, the benefits of diversity in corporations, and the challenges of doing business in changing political and economic contexts.

With such massive experience garnered from over two decades of working in Africa, Dr Duggan joins UCT at a time when we are striving to not only be the best in Africa, but also the best for Africa. UCT’s vision for being a socially responsive university translates into research and teaching that focuses on producing African solutions for African problems, and into collaborations we develop with other researchers across Africa.