Dr. Grieve Chelwa is a Lecturer in economics at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town. From 2016 to 2017, Dr. Chelwa was an inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for African Studies at Harvard University. In 2017 he was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Dr. Chelwa has wide-ranging research interests including research on the economics of education, health economics (including the economics of tobacco control in Africa) and a recent project that aims at challenging the epistemic foundations of the development economics literature on Africa. Dr. Chelwa is also interested in the evaluation of large-scale government interventions that aim at correcting market failures in southern Africa, particularly in his native Zambia. His research work has been supported by grants from the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics (LSE), the Volkswagen Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Government of Zambia via a bursary to pursue his undergraduate studies.

Before joining academia, Dr. Chelwa served as a Management Associate for Citibank based in Johannesburg, was a researcher for the Centre for Financial Regulation and Inclusion (Cenfri) in Cape Town and interned with the Central Bank of Zambia. Dr. Chelwa is a frequent blogger and commentator and some of his writings and opinions have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Quartz Africa and Africa Is A Country where he is a Contributing Editor.

Dr. Chelwa holds postgraduate degrees in economics from the University of Cape Town including a PhD. He holds a BA in economics with statistics from the University of Zambia.