Raenette Taljaard

Senior Lecturer, Public Policy, University of Cape Town

Raenette Taljaard is a senior lecturer in public policy at the University of Cape Town. She was previously director of the Helen Suzman Foundation. She was the youngest woman to be elected to the South African parliament when she became an MP in 1999 at the age of 25. She served as shadow minister of finance and was a member of the Portfolio Committee on Finance and the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. Raenette is a Yale World Fellow, a Fellow of the Emerging Leaders Programme of the Centre for Leadership and Public Values (UCT’s Graduate School of Business and Duke University) and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. She holds a BA in law, a BA with honors in political science, and an MA with honors in international relations from the University of Johannesburg, as well as an MSc with honors in public administration and public policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Raenette is an alumna of the Prince of Wales Business and Environment Programme at the University of Cambridge. She lectures extensively locally and abroad on the privatization of security, military outsourcing and the need for regulation. She is a Fellow of the fourth class of the Africa Leadership Initiative-South Africa and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.