Dr. Pali Lehohla

Dr Pali Lehohla is the Director of the Economic Modelling Academy (E.M.A.), which aims to empower bureaucrats, civil society, academia, and corporations in the use, applications, and policy engagements through the use of integrated web-based tools of economic scenario setting, quantification, monitoring, and evaluation. He is a board member of I.E.J. and the Foundation for Human Rights. He is the former South African Statistician-General, a position he held from 2000 to 2017. He was co-chair of PARIS21 and the United Nations Statistics Commission Chair.

He was the founding chair of the Statistics Commission of Africa (StatCom Africa) and chaired the African Symposium for Statistical Development (ASSD). He was the Vice President of the International Statistics Institute (I.S.I.). He served as one of the twenty-five-member panel on Data Revolution appointed by the U.N. Secretary-General. Dr Lehohla has been a forceful advocate for improving Africa’s Civil Registration and Vital Statistics systems. He consulted extensively on statistics in the in-conflict, out-of-conflict, and fragile states. Since 2018, he has become a Research Associate at Oxford University and Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg.

Since September 2002, he has been a weekly columnist for the Business Report. Since May 2022, he has been a weekly columnist in the Sunday Times Daily Online and a regular contributor to leadership magazines.