Alison Gillwald (Ph.D.) is the Executive Director of Research ICT Africa (RIA). She headed the policy department at the first broadcasting regulator in South Africa, the Independent Broadcasting Authority established in the wake of the first democratic elections in 1994. Subsequently, she was appointed to the founding Council of the South African Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (SATRA).
Alison has played an advisory role to several African and regional bodies including the Ministry of Communication on South Africa’s Broadband Plan: SA Connect, the African Development Bank and the Government of Mauritius on the i-Mauritius broadband policy. She has worked extensively with multilateral agencies such as the International Telecommunications Union, UNCTAD and the World Bank.
She served on the first ITU Task Force on Gender Issues set up in 2001 to develop gender-aware guidelines for policy-making and regulatory agencies and on the Partnership on Measuring the Information Society Task Group on Gender to develop standard indicators for measuring gender inequality in relation to ICT and which drew extensively on the sex-disaggregated statistics and gender modelling in relation to ICT access and use undertaken by Research ICT Africa for more than a decade across Africa.
Alison holds an adjunct professorship at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Development, Policy and Practice where she convenes a transdisciplinary Ph.D. programme focusing on ICT policy and regulation.