Speaker Bio

Dr Greg Mills is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Navarra in Spain and the strategic advisor to several African leaders. Previously, from 2005, he was for 20 years the founding director for the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation. He holds degrees from the Universities of Cape Town (BA Hons) and Lancaster (MA cum laude, and PhD), where he was the recipient of the Philip Andrew Memorial Scholarship. After teaching at the University of the Western Cape and UCT, he became, first, the Director of Studies and then the National Director of the South African Institute of International Affairs from 1994-2005. He has directed numerous reform projects with African governments, including as Strategy Advisor to the President of Rwanda, and in Mozambique, Malawi, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and at various levels of government in South Africa. He sat on the Danish Africa Commission and on the African Development Bank’s high-level panel on fragile states, and served four deployments to Afghanistan with the British Army as the adviser to the commander. He has also worked extensively in Colombia, and with a variety of African governments in both improving the conditions for peacebuilding and investment, including through the Zambezi Protocol in 2016 and the 2025 Zambezi Minute on the natural resource sector. A Senior Associate Fellow and Advisory Board member of the Royal United Services Institute, he is the author of the best-selling books Why Africa Is Poor and Africa’s Third Liberation, and together with President Olusegun Obasanjo Making Africa Work: A Handbook for Economic Success. In 2018 he completed a second stint as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, in producing a book on the state of African democracy, which was published as Democracy Works in 2019. The Asian Aspiration: Why and How Africa Should Emulate Asia (again with President Obasanjo and former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn) followed in 2020, which identifies the relevant lessons from Asia’s development and growth story. His writings won him the Recht Malan Prize for Non-Fiction Work in South Africa. His latest books – Expensive Poverty – which details the failings of aid, and suggests several ways to improve development outcomes, was published by Pan Macmillan in October 2021;while The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan (Hurst/Oxford University Press) appeared at the start of 2022. An edited compendium on Better Choices (Pan Macmillan) for the South African economy was published in March 2022. In 2023 he completed Rich State, Poor State (Penguin Random House) on how and why reforms work, which was launched that October. The Art of War and Peace (written with David Kilcullen), published also by Penguin Random House in August 2024, focuses on global security challenges and options. His most recent work is The Essence of Success: Insights from Sport, Business, War and Politics, written with the 5-time Le Mans winner Emanuele Pirro, published by Penguin in October 2025.