Jo Beall is Deputy Vice Chancellor of University of Cape Town and Chair of the Executive Committee of the African Centre for Cities at UCT. She is still affiliated with the London School of Economics, where she was Director of the Development Studies Institute, and taught for 18 years. She also taught at the Development Planning Unit of University College London and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal where she now holds an honorary professorship. She has consulted for the World Bank, the European Union, UN-Habitat, and a number of bilateral development agencies, and has published widely in development and urban studies journals.



Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis is a Senior Economist at UNDP. Previously, he worked with UNU-WIDER (Helsinki), ICRIER (New Delhi), EXIM Bank of India (Bangalore), and IGIDR (Mumbai). He has worked and published extensively on international trade and finance, capital markets, growth, development, food security, informal sectors, gender, and urbanization. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Rochester (NY, USA).


Ravi Kanbur is T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs at Cornell University, having previously taught at Oxford, Cambridge, Essex, Princeton, and Warwick. He has served on the senior staff of the World Bank, including as resident Representative in Ghana, Chief Economist for Africa, Principal Adviser to the Chief Economist of the World Bank. He has published in the leading economics journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, The American Economic Review, and the Economic Journal.