Gabrielle Wills

Dr Gabrielle Wills is an education economist born in South Africa. She is currently a senior researcher at Research on Socio-Economic Policy and senior lecturer in the Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University.

Her research focus areas include systems reform in Early Childhood Development, early grade reading, and basic education. In 2020 and 2021, she was a team lead for the National Income Dynamics Study – Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Study (NIDS-CRAM) which aimed to provide reliable socio-economic related statistics to support policy-making in South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is currently leading a project titled “COVID-Generation” to track the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the educational outcomes and post-school trajectories of South African youth. She has been significantly involved in the Ilifa Labantwana and Resep ECD Working Paper Series - this project aims to accelerate knowledge and policy-evidence on early childhood development to support the restructuring of government oversight of this sector. She was also the project lead for an ESRC/DFID funded study titled “Reading and socio-emotional skills in challenging school contexts: Evidence from South African primary schools”, following her role as project coordinator and senior researcher for the ESRC/DFID project (ES/N01023X/1) titled “Succeeding Against the Odds: Understanding resilience and exceptionalism in high-functioning township and rural primary schools in South Africa”. Working with a team of researchers including colleagues in the South African Department of Basic Education, she has been involved in producing the first available early grade reading benchmarks in African languages in South Africa. Her work on early grade reading emanated from the "Binding Constraints in Education" project for the South African Presidency and the European Union. A key recommendation of the report that “all children should be able to read for meaning by the end of grade 10” was adopted in 2019 by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as a top five national priority.