Mr. Pali Lehohla
Statistician-General of South Africa
Dr. Pali Lehohla is the Statistician General of South Africa, a position he held since November of 2000. He is the Chair of Africa Symposium for Statistical Development (ASSD), a country led initiative established in 2006 and the aim of which is to put statistical evidence at the centre of policy in Africa. From 2005 to 2010 he served in a variety of portfolios. He was Chair of the United Nations Statistics Commission, Chair of Statistics Commission Africa and also Chair of PARIS21 a global partnership for statistical development in the 21st Century. He is also the Chair for the Sub-Group on Harmonization of Statistics in Africa. He has served as an advisor to in-conflict, post-conflict and fragile political environments. In this regard he was 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. He served as a UN envoy to the Census of Cambodia in 1998. He undertook a Population Census readiness mission in Afghanistan in 2008 and another in Iraq in 2009. He is Vice President of the International Statistics Institute (ISI) and led the hosting of the 57th Session of the ISI held in Durban South Africa in 2009. Under his leadership 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. The first book towards achieving this objective on the South African series was published in 2005. He obtained his degree from the National University of Lesotho (NUL) with double major in Statistics and Economics, undertook post-graduate studies in demography from the United Nations Regional Institute for Population Studies (UNRIPS) at the University of Ghana and Senior Executive Programme jointly awarded by Wits and Harvard Universities. In December 2015, his alma mater, the University of Ghana recognised his contribution in statistics and honoured him and the University of Stellenbosch conferred on Pali Lehohla an Honorary Doctorate for his extensive contribution in global affairs.