Catherine Duggan

Catherine joined the UCT GSB as Director in September 2020. Before joining, she was the founding faculty member of the African Leadership University School of Business (ALUSB) in Rwanda, where she served as Vice Dean and Professor for four years. Prior to her position in Rwanda, she was on the faculty of Harvard Business School (HBS) for nearly a decade. She has also taught on MBA and executive education programmes at institutions including the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School (SBS) and INSEAD.

Dr Duggan has won numerous awards. At HBS she was the first woman in the school’s history to win the Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Required Curriculum two years in a row, and also received the Charles M. Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching, being named the Berol Corporation Fellow. Dr Duggan has worked in Africa for more than twenty years and has experience in nearly two dozen countries on the continent. She is the author of a number of case studies on African firms and countries, including cases set in South Africa and Nigeria, as well as in DRC, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and others. Her academic research focuses on institutional development in Africa, including the formal and informal institutions that support markets and commerce, as well as the dynamics of credit transactions in contexts ranging from microfinance to sophisticated banking and financial markets.

She earned a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University, where she was the G.J. Lieberman Fellow for the Social Sciences, and received a BA with Honours in Political Science from Brown University.