Our Sectors
Our experience across different sectors is connected by a shared focus: helping organisations set clear direction, build the right capabilities, and deliver results that matter.
Digital change reshapes how regulators operate. Universities produce the leaders and researchers who drive policy and innovation. Regulation shapes economic outcomes. Economic development depends on capable institutions working together. Development@Work is built to work across all four areas — and particularly where they overlap.
Digital Transformation
Regulatory Institutions
Higher Education
Economic Development
Digital change is reshaping how public institutions work, deliver services, and use knowledge. Development@Work helps institutions navigate this shift as a strategic and organisational challenge — not simply a technology exercise.
Our experience in this area includes work on South Africa's national digital research infrastructure, monitoring and evaluation of e-government and Information Society initiatives, knowledge management design for public institutions, and readiness assessments for organisations preparing for significant digital transitions. We understand the governance, capability, and cultural dimensions of real digital transformation in public settings.
Selected Engagements
Regulatory bodies work in demanding environments. They must be independent, effective, and accountable — often with limited resources and in the face of rapidly evolving markets and legal frameworks.
Development@Work has a strong track record of strategic planning and institutional support for competition authorities and regulatory bodies across southern and eastern Africa. We understand how regulators think, how they plan, and what it takes to build the kind of strategy that actually gets implemented in these settings.
Selected Engagements
Universities are more than service providers. They produce knowledge, develop future leaders, and play a central role in how a society learns, adapts, and grows. Development@Work understands this complexity — and we bring it to every university engagement we take on.
Our work in this area spans strategic planning, institutional transformation, governance, leadership development, resourcing frameworks, and transformation plans. We have worked with universities in South Africa, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Palestine — across a wide range of institutional settings, from long-established research universities to newly created institutions and faculties.
We also have significant experience at the system level, having supported historically disadvantaged universities with intensive capacity development and contributed directly to the establishment of South Africa's first new universities since 1994.
Selected Engagements
Inclusive economic development does not happen by itself. It requires capable institutions that can design effective strategies, mobilise resources, and see programmes through from idea to impact. Development@Work supports public bodies and development organisations working on industrial growth, enterprise support, export development, and sector transformation.
Our work in this area has included export development strategy for the City of Johannesburg, enterprise development research for the Gauteng Enterprise Development Agency, programme design for Wesgro, trade promotion planning, and research into manufacturing competitiveness across Johannesburg's industrial nodes.
Selected Engagements
The most important institutional challenges often do not sit neatly in one sector. They emerge where digital change meets regulatory responsibility, where universities shape the quality of public leadership, and where regulation and economic development pull in opposite directions.
Development@Work is well placed to work at these overlaps. Over more than two decades, our practice has deliberately crossed between digital, regulatory, academic, and economic development contexts — developing a distinctive ability to see how these areas connect and what integrated solutions look like.
One example: our seven-year management of the Industrial Development Think Tank at the Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development — a research programme that brought together industrial strategy, regulatory economics, and development thinking within a university setting.
Where Our Sectors Intersect
We would be glad to explore how our experience could support your organisation's strategy and direction.