Ann Bernstein is the founding director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE).  She was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of California, Los Angeles.  She was awarded an Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Fellowship to study in the US.

 

The first part of Ann’s professional career was spent working for the Urban Foundation, a privately funded NGO that was instrumental in using the power and influence of business to persuade the apartheid government to reform key aspects of its approach to black urbanization.  In 1989 she was appointed an executive director of the Foundation and served in that capacity for 5 years until its closure in early 1995. 

 

In 1991 she was a Visiting Fellow at Peter Berger’s Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, Boston University. 

 

In 1994 she was appointed to the Development Bank Transformation Team and subsequently to the Transitional Board of the Development Bank of Southern Africa.  From 1997 – 2001 she was a member of the Board of the Development Bank.  In 2007 she was appointed to the board of the Brenthurst Foundation, which focuses on African economic development. 

 

Acknowledged as one of the country's leading development experts, she is a strong proponent of the importance of economic growth in promoting democracy and sustainable development.  Bernstein regularly addresses conferences and other meetings in South Africa and abroad, and contributes to journals and newspapers on a wide range of national issues. 

 

She has published extensively on business, democracy, development and policy-making in South Africa, including the books Migration and Refugee Policies (with M. Weiner, 1999), Business and Democracy: Cohabitation or Contradiction? (with P.L. Berger, 1998), and Policy Making in A New Democracy: South Africa’s Challenges for the 21st Century. She has been a Visiting Lecturer at Wits University and subsequently a Visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town.