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Company Profile

 
TIPS provides services across six theme areas or policy pillars – Trade, African Economic Integration, Industrial Development,
Inequality and Economic Marginalisation, Sustainable Growth and Rural Development
 
TIPS is an independent, non-profit, economic research institution active in South Africa and the region. It was established at the request of senior policymakers of the new South African government in 1996. It became a Section 21 Company in 2001.
The organisation is based in Pretoria, South Africa and works with a network of researchers and partners across the continent. This allows us to draw on the skills and resources of universities and other centres of expertise in the region, in Africa and abroad, bringing in academic staff and external consultants when necessary.
The organisation’s activities are directed by a Board of Directors and a Board of Members. These include a cross-section of representatives from the private sector, government and non-government organisations (NGOs).
 
WHAT TIPS DOES
TIPS facilitates policy development and dialogue in pursuit of sustainable and equitable growth in Africa. The organisation supports government and regional institutions such as the South African Development Community (SADC).
TIPS also has experience in implementing policy. Our working model integrates research, policy development, advice, disseminating information, capacity building, technical support and programme design and management. Services provided include:
Policy development: TIPS supports research that is relevant for policymakers and provides a safe space for frank discussion by bringing together policy practitioners and the wider research community..
Conducting and commissioning research:Including identifying areas for new and required research, carrying out research as well as finding relevant researchers or partners. TIPS also makes research findings available to the public to stimulate debate.
Disseminating research:TIPS uses different methods to disseminate information and promote dialogue, including seminars, workshops, one-on-one briefings, newsletters, publications such as policy briefs, and its website.
Strengthening networking: TIPS is well-placed to connect various stakeholders nationally, regionally and internationally.
Capacity building: TIPS is involved in capacity building both internally through internships, mentorship and training support, and externally through training courses, policy briefings and small research grants.
Technical assistance: TIPS provides technical assistance, skills transfer and advisory support to government.
Project design: Translating strategy into programme delivery, including designing implementing systems, information management and reporting systems, monitoring and evaluation, and policy impact assessment. 
Managing projects and programmes: Programme management and technical support.
 
OUR EXPERTISE
Although TIPS focuses on six core policy areas, these do not work in isolation. Industrial development, for example, overlaps with sustainable growth in creating green jobs. Policy implications for small development cut across industrial development and economic marginalisation. Climate change overlaps with trade and regional integration. Rural development is central to tackling economic marginalisation.
Staff members therefore work together across areas to ensure a holistic approach to specific assignments. This flexibility allows the team to develop tailored solutions for different programmes and projects.
Our expertise ranges from project design and implementation to policy development and events management. Our team has a variety of strengths including strong programme and process management and institutional support structure, particularly in finance and contracts management.
TIPS staff also has experience in setting up online and offline databases, including trade statistics, developing statistical systems and conducting impact analyses. A number of our economists have strong fieldwork and industrial policy expertise in the area of industrial development.
 
POLICY PILLARS
 
Trade has been the key pillar of TIPS’s activities since its inception in 1996, with a focus on trade policy and negotiations as well as analysis of South Africa and Southern Africa’s trade performance. More recently, deliberate efforts have been made to advance research and other activities beyond South Africa into the region, including the development of the SADC Trade Database, intra-SADC trade performance reviews and capacity building in trade data analysis and computable general equilibrium modeling. This is now being supplemented by research work in other trade-related areas, such as industrial policy, investment, sustainable growth and non-tariff barriers to trade. This will entail closer links with other pillars. Other important areas are infrastructure, investment and services research.
Working relationships: SADC Secretariat and South African Department of Trade and Industry (the dti).
 
Economic integration expands markets and work opportunities, allows for the promotion and diffusion of technology and enables a more attractive investment climate. Economic integration has long been a core objective of the African continent, though success has been mixed. In the past TIPS has focused on the trade aspect of integration and on other aspects such as employment and investment. A comprehensive African economic integration programme is now being outlined. Policy issues include assessing how investment policies could be co-ordinated in the region, a financial market strategy at a regional level, and competition policy. Other focus areas include co-ordination of technology and labour mobility.
Working relationships: SADC Secretariat, Botswana Institute for Development and Policy Analysis (BIDPA), Universities of Pretoria, Eduardo Mondlane and Mauritius, and the Competition Commission of SA.
 
Economic marginalisation – what used to be called the second economy – is at one end of the spectrum of high inequality: manifest in poverty, lack of economic access and social alienation. The work of this pillar builds on the outcomes of a strategy process commissioned by the South African Presidency, and reflected in a framework document, Addressing Inequality and Economic Marginalisation. This focused on three areas of structural inequality.
The structure of the economy: its impacts on unemployment and local economic development. This included competition issues, small enterprise, the informal sector, value chains and labour markets.
Spatial inequality: the legacy of the 1913 Land Act, bantustans and apartheid cities, and the impacts of recent policies, looking at rural development, skewed agriculture patterns, and the scope for payment for environmental services to create rural employment.
Inequality of human capital: education and health.
As the strategies required to address these issues – as the New Growth Path tries to do – will take time, a complementary set of strategies was proposed. This included the need to scale up public employment. With support from the Presidency and the Department for Social Development, the Community Work Programme (CWP) was initiated. 
 
CWP— Taking a programme to scale
TIPS’s involvement in the CWP is an example of the range of services TIPS can provide, including policy innovation, programme design and implementation, technical support, the management of reporting databases, monitoring and evaluation, and policy impact assessment. The CWP is adapted from the concept of a minimum employment guarantee, as developed in India. It is designed to create an employment safety net by providing participants with a minimum number of days of regular work, typically two days a week. TIPS was involved in the design as part of its work on the second economy. The pilot phase and initial rollout was project managed by TIPS in partnership with two implementing agents. The CWP was handed over into government, as a programme of DCoG, from April 2010. Since then TIPS has been providing technical support to DCoG. This includes a research component, linked primarily to impact assessment. By April 2011, the CWP had grown to 74 sites with more than 89 000 people having participated, and a commitment from government to roll it out countrywide to reach 237 000 people by 2014.
Working relationships: Presidency, Departments of Cooperative Governance (DCoG) and Water Affairs, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South African National Bio-diversity Institute (SANBI).
 
TIPS’s traditional focus for this pillar has been South Africa, supporting the dti in advancing its industrial policy. This has been expanded to the region. Building a regional industrial platform needs to integrate trade and industrial policy, and we have an existing foundation through the Thematic Working Group we host in the region under the Southern African Development Research Network (SADRN). Research is also needed on how to increase the competitiveness of local and regional industry and on how to support complementary industrial development efforts. South Africa is developing industrial development strategies at a sector level. TIPS has been involved in this and there is scope to introduce a regional angle. Linking with opportunities in other emerging economies in the South is another focus.
Working relationships: The dti, the South African Presidency, and the Universities of Cape Town, KwaZulu-Natal, Rome, Zambia and Mauritius.
 
Natural capital, that is the stock of renewable and non-renewable resources used for production, is crucial for growth and development. Revenues from natural resource extraction can be a driver for growth, or an impediment, for example the rising cost of imported oil. Preserving ecological systems and landscape matters economically, underpinning industries, such as agriculture and tourism, and livelihoods. TIPS works in a number of areas related to the green economy, including the economic dimensions of climate change and low-carbon energy, and the growth of green industries as a driver for industrialisation and job creation.
Working relationships: the dti, Department of Economic Development, National Treasury, National Planning Commission, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), South African environmental consultants and green industry companies, University of Cape Town, and University of Pretoria.
 
A strategic future policy focus will be agriculture and agro-processing, concentrating on how this can advance rural development, including food security and assessing opportunities around regional agricultural value chains. Rural development will be integrated into the sustainable growth programme around issues such as climate change mitigation and how these may provide alternative job creation strategies, which in turn also overlap with the inequality and economic marginalisation pillar.
Working relationships: University of Pretoria, DCoG.
 
SOME RECENT PROGRAMMES AND PROJECTS
 
The dti: TIPS has a Memorandum of Understanding with the dti and is working on a number of projects including support for the Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP) process.
Southern Africa Development Network (SADRN): SADRN is policy and research network, launched in 2007 and closed in 2011. The objective was to link a pool of skilled researchers and build the institutional capacity of key organisations. Partners were BIDPA and the University of Mauritius Faculty of Business, Management and Law. In the next phase, TIPS will be working with existing partners to extend the network to include new partners.
SADC Trade Database: TIPS continues to host the SACD Trade Database, which provides trade statistics for the region as a public good. Although the programme has ended, the database continues to be a frequently visited website (see www.sadctrade.org).
Competition policy: TIPS is working with the Competition Commission of South Africa to establish research and capacity building around competition issues in the agro-industry sector in African countries.
Green jobs and the green economy: TIPS is collaborating in producing a report that details the distribution in time (short, medium and long term) and over sectors (manufacturing, construction and operations and maintenance) of the green jobs targeted by the SA government’s New Growth Path.
Climate risks and opportunities: This collaboration with Camco was an assessment of the economic risks and opportunities associated with climate change in South Africa. The report was used in compiling the SA National Climate Change Response Strategy. 
Climate and trade: TIPS provided input to the BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) Expert Forum on the likelihood, impact and legality of border carbon tax adjustments, as well as recommendations on how to deal with these in multilateral climate negotiations.
Climate finance – the SA Renewables Initiative (SARi):Rolling out renewable energy at scale provides an industrial opportunity while tackling the climate challenge. Overcoming the high up-front cost of these technologies needs innovative funding instruments. TIPS, with partners in the European Union (EU) and South Africa, conducted an evaluation for the German development bank (KfW) of such an instrument.
TDCA Facility: A consortium led by WYG International, with TIPS as the local partner, has been contracted to manage an EU-funded programme to facilitate dialogue and co-operation between the EU and SA.
 
TIPS CORE STAFF
TIPS staff comprises a multi-disciplinary team whose expertise includes trade, industrial development agriculture, sustainable development and inequality. The core team reflects its growing regional focus with staff from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. TIPS is committed to building leadership and supporting gender equality. TIPS has a staff of 19, and 11 of these are women.
Ximena Gonzalez-Nunez: Executive director
Ximena Gonzalez-Nunez has a Masters of Commerce, specialising in trade economics. She was previously at the Delegation of the European Commission to South Africa where her work involved monitoring the design, implementation and evaluation of certain EU-funded national and regional programmes related to trade and economic issues as well as the formulation and adoption of certain Protocols within SADC.
Juanita Pardesi: COO and CWP programme manager
Juanita Pardesi has more than 16 years’ experience working at local, national, regional and international levels. Her expertise includes project design and management, evaluation, financial management, capacity building, translating strategy into operational objectives, evaluating grant applications, drafting contracts, project assessment, due diligent audits, and assessing project risk. She has an MBA from UNISA in conjunction with the UK Open University.
Myriam Velia: Head of research
Myriam Velia has expertise in a range of development economics areas. She has worked and continues to work on a number of projects, among others on gender, labour, trade, investment and local economic development. Myriam has worked and is still involved on a part-time basis with the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal as a researcher. Myriam has a PhD in (International) Economics from Sussex University.
Bongani Motsa:
Programme manager  African economic integration
Bongani Motsa holds a Master of Commerce degree (majoring in econometrics) and a BA Social Science degree (economics and statistics). Prior to joining TIPS Bongani was senior economist and head of research at Pan-African Investment and Research Services where, among other things, he specialised in providing macroeconomic analysis to domestic and international clientele.  He also has experience in constructing econometric models.
Kate Philip
Programme manager: Inequality and economic marginalisation
Kate Philip is a development strategist with over 20 years’ experience in social and economic policy development and implementation. She has worked for the National Union of Mineworkers and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID). While based at TIPS, Kate led a strategy process on inequality and economic marginalisation for the South African Presidency. She initiated and programme managed the pilot phase of the CWP, and continues to provide strategic advice and technical support. She was part of a design team of an International labour Organization course, Mitigating a Jobs Crisis: Innovations in Public Employment Programmes. She has a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Peet Du Plooy
Programme manager: Sustainable growth
Peet Du Plooy has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria. After working in energy research and development at the national utility Eskom, he joined the global environmental NGO World Wildlife Fund as trade and investment advisor for South Africa. He was elected in 2009 as chair of the South African green industries association, the Environmental Goods and Services Forum. His expertise lies in networked infrastructure, including energy, transport and ICT, and the economics of sustainability.
 
Mbofholowo Tsedu: Assistant Programme Manager
Mbofholowo Tsedu is a researcher with a B Comm Economics degree from the University of Pretoria. His main focus at TIPS is trade and industrial policy issues. He previously worked in the Economic Sector of the Policy Co-ordination and Advisory Services unit at the Presidency. Mbofholowo is enrolled in a Master of Science (MSc) programme in Economic Management and Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. His specialisation is industrialisation, trade and economic policy.
 
BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND MEMBERS
Alan Hirsch (Board of Directors chair) Presidency
Jorge Maia Industrial Development Corporation
Nimrod Zalk – the dti
Shirley Robinson (Board of Members chair) Economic Rise Consulting
Fundi Tshazibana National Treasury
Leslie Maasdorp Bank of America Merrill Lynch –
Southern Africa
Merle Holden University of KwaZulu-Natal
Rashad Cassim South African Reserve Bank
Stephen Yeo Centre for Economic Policy Research
Nkosi Madula – the dti
Simon Roberts Competition Commission
Ravindra Naidoo Development Bank of Southern Africa
Rosalind H Thomas R.H. Thomas Consulting C.C.

 

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