Mary Metcalfe

Lead sector specialist: social infrastructure at the Development Bank of Southern Africa

“Corruption takes resources from the poor; distorts the energies, attention and effectiveness of public servants; and spreads like a cancer. It is contrary to social justice. It has no place in the South Africa that so many people sacrificed so much to achieve. Corruption Watch must be an instrument that ordinary South Africans make their own in our individual and collective fight against corruption.”

Professor Mary Metcalfe is lead sector specialist: social infrastructure at the Development Bank of Southern Africa. 

Best known as an educationist, she is a visiting fellow on the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg, and a visiting adjunct professor at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).  She has been a member of the Open Society Foundation’s General Education Sub-Board since 2006.

Metcalfe was elected as a member of the African National Congress in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature in 1994 and was appointed member of the executive council (MEC) for education in Gauteng, where she served from 1994 to 1999. This was followed by an appointment as MEC for agriculture, conservation, environment and land.

In 2004 she returned to education, joining the University of the Witwatersrand as head of the School of Education, where she had the task of bringing together the Johannesburg College of Education (JCE) and the Wits Education Faculty into a single school.

In 2009 she was appointed director general of the new national Department of Higher Education and Training where she worked on the development of a post-school education and training system.

She holds a teacher’s certificate, a B.Ed (University of Zimbabwe) and, from Wits, an M.Ed and a diploma in specialised education. She worked as a teacher and a principal of a remedial centre before moving to teacher education at JCE and Wits in 1982.

While on special leave at the end of 2010 and early 2011, she volunteered as the project manager leading the development of a professional institute for teacher development for the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union.