Prof. Hlengiwe Ndlovu is an Associate Professor and Deputy Director: Special Initiatives and Partnerships at the Centre on African Philanthropy and Social Investment, Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand. She joined CAPSI after serving as Senior Lecturer and later Associate Professor at the Wits School of Governance. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Prof. Ndlovu is a feminist sociologist whose scholarship sits at the intersection of gender, governance, social justice, public institutions, protest politics, violence and decolonial feminist thought. Her work examines how power is organised and contested in African societies, with particular attention to everyday political agency, democratic practice, care, community-making and institutional transformation.
Her scholarship has contributed to debates on state-society relations, social movements, gendered politics, violence, justice and post-apartheid transformation in South Africa and broader African contexts. Her current work extends these concerns into African philanthropy and social investment, with a focus on women’s philanthropy, feminist funding, care labour, civic agency and the institutional conditions that make more just futures possible. She is also part of the team working with South Africa’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment to mainstream gender in the country’s reporting on the United Nations Paris Agreement Biennial Transparency Report on climate change.
Prof. Ndlovu is co-editor of Rioting and Writing: Diaries of Wits Fallists (2017), a collection that documents student voices, political imagination and protest during the #FeesMustFall moment. She is also the researcher and narrator of Inkululeko, a documentary that turns her academic research on freedom, democracy and state-society relations into a wider public conversation about the meanings and unfinished promises of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa.
Her scholarly and public contributions have been recognised through competitive fellowships and national honours. In 2020, she was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 50 South African Influential Women under the category “The Guiding Women”. She is a 2024 Wits Chancellor’s Fellow through the Female Academic Leaders Fellowship and a 2025 Social Science Research Council African Peacebuilding Network Individual Research Fellow, where her project examines artificial intelligence, gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa.
Prof. Ndlovu also contributes actively to public intellectual and civic life. She facilitates dialogues between local government and communities on gender, LGBTQIA+ inclusion and youth voter apathy, and regularly provides commentary on local and international media platforms, including television, radio and print media. She currently serves as Associate Editor of Africa Spectrum and brings extensive experience in academic leadership, postgraduate training, research development, public engagement and institutional strategy.
