Chris Darroll
Founder and Executive Director - chris@sbp.org.za

Chris has more than 23 years’ experience in SME development, research, and business-related policy. She currently heads the Executive Secretariat of the Investment Climate Facility (ICF), and played a leading role, as project manager and principal agent, in the ICF’s establishment. In the 1990s she headed the secretariat to the Sunnyside Group (a coalition of interests encompassing businesses, NGOs, and political movements aimed at bringing black South Africans marginalised by apartheid laws and practices into the mainstream economy). She has served as an advisor to the South African Minister of Trade and Industry and the South African Minister of Finance, and has consulted to the World Bank, DFID, GtZ, USAID, and CIPE (Centre for International Private Enterprise) on the promotion of private sector growth and SME development in sub-Saharan Africa. She has worked on donor-funded programmes to facilitate regulatory best practice and private sectorled development in various African countries, including Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Lesotho, and Namibia. She has consulted to large corporations on the design and implementation of programmes for promoting business linkages and supplier development, and played a leading role in establishing Psi Tanzania, a major business linkage programme in Tanzania, described in UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2003 as ‘an innovative and pioneering model of corporate social investment to achieve market-driven local economic growth’.

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Prof Douglas Irvine
Director of Policy Programmes and Research- douglas@sbp.org.za

Douglas joined SBP in 2002. Current and recent responsibilities include consulting to the Commonwealth Secretariat on its enterprise development programmes, and managing SBP’s Cutting Red Tape for Business in Africa project, its South African Regulatory Compliance Costs Survey, and an eight-month study by an SBP-led consortium for the South African Presidency and National Treasury on the introduction of regulatory impact analysis (RIA) in South Africa. He is an emeritus professor of the University of Natal, where he was Professor and Head of the Department of Political Studies. As Dean of Social Science he was extensively involved in university governance. From 1994 to 1996, during the constitutionmaking period, he was seconded as full-time technical advisor to the Commission on Provincial Government, with responsibility for developing recommendations to the Constitutional Assembly on all matters relating to provincial and local government. He took early retirement from the university in 1996 to join a Johannesburg-based policy think-tank, the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), as Senior Associate. He has worked on a wide range of policy issues.

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Kerri McDonald
Research Manager - kerri@sbp.org.za

Kerri has worked in the field of public policy research in South Africa and the United Kingdom. She joined SBP in 2004, and has worked on a number of projects aimed at improving the regulatory environment in South Africa, including the investigation into the possibilities for Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) in South Africa, on behalf of the Presidency and the National Treasury, and the analysis of the red tape burden in relation to the tourism sector. Kerri has been closely involved in the development and launch of the ICF, and currently supports the ICF executive secretariat. Prior to joining SBP in September 2004, Kerri worked as a senior researcher in the Office for Public Management in London (1999–2004). At OPM her primary focus areas were policy research and evaluation, stakeholder engagement, and consultation. She holds a Master’s degree in Political Studies from the University of Natal.

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