A New Chapter: From Apartheid Railways to Taxi Finance

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I walked across the stage at Stellenbosch University and became officially inducted as Dr. Timothy Ngalande. My supervisor, , who has been generous enough to share this milestone, the journey and some imppressions of my work on LinkedIn noted something remarkable: that the best research not only answers a question and closes a door, but the kind that opens five more.

My PhD did exactly that.

What the thesis was really about

The official title is broad: Growth, Productivity and Labour Misallocation: Apartheid South Africa. But the heart of the question is simple: when a government (or indeed any economic unit) intentionally distorts where the population can work, what jobs they take and restricts where they live — what does that cost the economy?

I approached this through three studies.

The first used South Africa’s national railway network as a natural experiment. Apartheid’s spatial logic required that Black workers live in racially designated areas, far from industrial centres. Railways were explicitly designed to enforce this distance. But when the state upgraded rail lines for logistical reasons, it inadvertently reduced the effective economic distance between those segregated communities and the factories that needed their labour. I found that these rail upgrades increased aggregate manufacturing productivity, not despite enforcing segregation, but because they partially offset it. The mechanism was allocative efficiency: workers could reach more productive firms.

The second study built a general equilibrium model to quantify the cost of the job reservation system; the set of laws that legally barred Black workers from certain (mostly skilled) occupations. The answer was striking: aggregate productivity was negatively afffected by misallocation rather than technical inefficiency. Discrimination didn’t make firms worse at what they did. It prevented the right people from doing the right jobs.

The third study examined racial bias in technological progress in 20th-century South African industry: whether technological progress in mining and manufacturing was racially skewed, and what that implied for growth. This study found that growth in technology improved white labour’s productivity more than black workers.

These studies mounted on the back of four years of archive visits, Stata code, GIS map digitisatisation, general equilibrium calibrations in R, robustness checks, and more data validation than I can remember.

What comes next

After submitting and defending my thesis, I accepted a new research role with JPAL based at , South Africa’s largest dedicated financier for the minibus taxi industry, with nearly 50% of taxis on its finance and insurance books.

Here is what resonated with me from the onset: my new role leveraged on every piece of my background, from my early days in banking, analytical work in mobile money and recent research exploits. Working at the intersection of academia and small business finance in a corporate world, furthers my learning and appreciation of how symbiotic both worlds are.

I work alongside an incredible team of faculty: (Duke’s Fuqua School of Business), and (Dartmouth), and (Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management). Together, we are running a series of RCT’s in behavioral finance.

The core questions:

How does loan restructuring affect borrower effort? If you reduce a struggling operator’s monthly payment, do they work harder to build their business — or does the breathing room reduce their urgency?
What drives repayment behaviour? Is it liquidity, or something more behavioural — commitment devices, social pressure, the salience of deadlines?
Can we design financial products that smooth income shocks without creating moral hazard?
Does encouraging better driving practices — through telematics data and behavioural nudges — affect loan performance?

These are questions that matter for South Africa’s 250,000+ taxi operators, for the 15 million people who depend on them daily, and for the broader challenge of extending learnings in formal finance for small businesses across the continent.

They are also, frankly, some of the most exciting research questions I have encountered. The data is extraordinary. The scale is real. And the stakes are not abstract.

Why I’m writing

This and my future posts are an attempt to think out loud about the work I am and have been involved I. To share research learnings, methods and experiences in plain language. To connect historical work to the present and show how economic history does not simply look back but provide context for the future.

I also want to share some learning relating to my journey: from the University of Malawi to Industry, then Stellenbosch Uni, to Zurich, to Warwick Uni, and back to Industry the Stellenbosch again. Lessons about what it means to do research on a continent that often feels like it is studied more than understood. About the tensions, and the opportunity in sitting at the edge of research and industry.

Posts will go up roughly every two weeks. Some will be long. Some will be short. All of them will be an attempt to make this work legible to people outside the seminar room.

If any of this resonates, I’d genuinely welcome the conversation — on or by email.

Timothy Ngalande is Research Manager at Mobalyz and a research affiliate of LEAP (Laboratory of Economics of Africa’s Past) at Stellenbosch University.

Career | Timothy Ngalande

A New Chapter: From Apartheid Railways to Taxi Finance

What the thesis was really about

What comes next

Why I’m writing