Former Deputy Director-General of the Sector Branch of the dtic

Nimrod Zalk is the former Deputy Director-General of the Sector Branch of the South African Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (the dtic). He also served as Industrial Development Advisor in the Office of the Director-General between 2013 and 2023. Prior to that he was Deputy Director-General of the Industrial Development Division of the dtic. From 2009 until 2023 he was a non-executive director on the board of the Industrial Development Corporation. He is a Scientific Committee Member of the African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics (APORDE) and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences of the University of the Free State.

He holds an MSC in Economics and a PhD in Economics from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He has been appointed an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town’s Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance.

Nimrod has been involved in a range of policy, research and academic processes related to South African and broader African industrial development and trade, including management of sector Master Plans; establishing the Industrial Development Think Tank at the University of Johannesburg; developing and implementing South Africa’s National Industrial Policy Framework and Industrial Policy Action Plans (IPAP); and designing key industrial policy initiatives including various sector strategies, industrial financing instruments, and leveraging procurement for industrial development. He is a Member of Professor Joseph Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue: Africa Task, and co-founder of APORDE.