Two new researchers at the ASC: Fantu Cheru and Laura Mann

Two new researchers have started at the ASC: Fantu Cheru and Laura Mann. Professor Fantu Cheru is a political economist. His research concentrates on emerging powers and African development, natural resources governance with a focus on the mining sector, and South-South cooperation in agriculture and food security.
Next to his work as a senior researcher at the African Studies Center in Leiden, Fantu is a Distinguished Research Associate at the North-South Institute (Ottawa, Canada). He is also Emeritus Professor of African and Development Studies at American University in Washington DC.
From 2007-2012, Fantu was the Research Director at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. Previously, he served as a member of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Panel on Mobilizing International Support for the New Partnership for African Development (2005-2007). He also served as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Foreign Debt and Structural Adjustment for the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva from 1998-2001.

Laura Mann is an economic sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of markets in Africa. She received her Masters and PhD from the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh and her BSc in Environmental Policy and Economics from the London School of Economics. Before joining the ASC, she worked at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.
Her PhD examined the impact of tertiary education expansion and economic liberalization on trust relations and the flow of information between managers, job-seekers and civil servants in the Sudanese labour market. She then worked on a joint project between the University of Oxford, the University of Nairobi and the National University of Rwanda, examining the effects of broadband internet on the tea, tourism and outsourcing value chains of Kenya and Rwanda. At the ASC, she is developing a project examining how new technologies are changing the way economists and state actors understand and interact with informal economies.