Dr Pali Lehohla to receive Honorary Doctorate from UKZN

Dr Pali Lehohla, former Statistician General and head of Statistics South Africa, will receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) on Monday, 23 April 2018.

He is being recognised for his unprecedented role in evidence-based decision making and advocating for statistics in policy making in South Africa.

Lehohla will be capped Doctor of Science (honoris causa) at 19h00 on Monday, 23 April at a UKZN graduation ceremony taking place at the Royal Agricultural Showgrounds in Pietermaritzburg.

He will deliver an address at the ceremony.

Lehohla was the Statistician General of South Africa and head of Statistics South Africa from 2000 to 2017.  Under his leadership, Statistics South Africa became a dynamic, knowledge creation centre producing relevant information for policy planning and implementation.

He was responsible for improving the skills of Statistics SA officials in generating and using statistics, resulting in the forging of innovative partnerships with various higher education institutions. He also helped improve the state of official statistics in the rest of Africa and internationally.

Lehohla has served as the Chair of the Africa Symposium for Statistical Development (ASSD), a national initiative which aims to put statistical evidence at the centre of policy in Africa. He was also Chair of the United Nations Statistics Commission; Chair of Statistics Commission Africa; Chair of PARIS21 – a global partnership for statistical development in the 21st Century.

He has served as an advisor to in-conflict, post-conflict and fragile political environments, and was also Chief Advisor to the Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MOC) of the 2008 Population and Housing Census of Sudan which was part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2005.

Lehohla served as a UN envoy to the Census of Cambodia; he undertook a Population Census readiness mission in Afghanistan and another in Iraq; served as Vice- President of the International Statistics Institute (ISI), and led the hosting of the 57th Session of the ISI held in Durban in 2009.

He has established partnerships with universities in South Africa in advancing tuition of statistical training, research and applications in State planning.  Of note is the establishment of the Centre for Regional and Urban Innovation and Statistical Exploration (CRUISE) at the University of Stellenbosch.  Under the auspices of the Africa Census Analysis Project (ACAP), he initiated a series of publications on the Demography of South Africa as primary tuition material for higher learning and advancing Pan-African scholarship.

Source University of KwaZulu-Natal