Pippa Green

Pippa Green has been a journalist, writer, researcher and journalism teacher for more than three decades, working on newspapers, magazines, in radio, and at academic institutions.  She is (part-time) editor of Econ3x3, the online publication affiliated to SALDRU that focuses on publishing policy-relevant research on unemployment, inequality, and poverty in a readable and accessible way. Before that she spent two years as the national Press Ombudsman, the first woman to hold the position.

She holds an Honours degree in Economic History from UCT and an MSc from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City. She has been deputy editor of the Sunday Independent and the Pretoria News (1997-2001), and political editor and head of Radio News at the SABC (1995-1997; 2002-2005). She was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University (1998-1999) and was a visiting Ferris professor at Princeton University (2006). She is author of “Choice not Fate: The Life and Times of Trevor Manuel.” (Penguin, 2008), which was shortlisted for the Alan Paton Award.

She headed the Journalism Programme at the University of Pretoria from 2009 to 2014. From 2014-2019, she worked with the Research Project on Employment, Income Distribution, and Inclusive Growth (REDI3x3), based at UCT, which investigated ways to combat ongoing unemployment, poverty and inequality, and worked as a part-time news-editor in the EWN newsroom at Cape Talk. It was here she worked on the podcast series, History for the Future, comprising interviews with former Truth and Reconciliation commissioners on their reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the TRC and their thoughts on reconciliation in South Africa two decades after the first hearings. More recently, she compiled a podcast series of Rivonia trialist Andrew Mlangeni’s life and times, “Lessons from a Rivonia Trialist”. This year she published a report of the REDI3x3 research, “A Measure of our Ills – and how we might fix them.”

She has been a board member of the SABC (2010-2013), and is a member of the Advisory Council and executive committee of the Council for the Advancement of the SA Constitution (CASAC), as well as a public representative on the SA Press Council.

Currently she is teaching part-time at Stellenbosch University’s Journalism Department and working on a book.

She has written for a variety of publications including the New Yorker (online), Sunday Times, Business Day, Daily Maverick, Sunday Independent and Mail&Guardian, as well as contributed chapters in several books, most recently the Introduction to Wilson, F: Black, White & Gold (KMM Review Publishers, 2023), and (with Murray Leibbrandt and Vimal Ranchhod): “South Africa: The Top End, Labour Markets, Fiscal Redistribution, and the Persistence of Very High Inequality.” In Eds: Gradin, C. Leibbrandt, M and Tarp, F: Inequality in the Developing World (Oxford University Press, 2021).