Dr Matteo Rizzo

Matteo  has degrees from "L'Orientale" University (Naples, Italy) and SOAS (MSc and PhD), where he also completed an ESRC post-doctorate fellowship. Matteo has taught at SOAS, LSE, Oxford and Cambridge, where he was a Smuts Research Fellow in African Studies at the Centre of African Studies. Matteo also worked for over two years as a policy adviser on rural poverty for Save the Children UK and as a consultant for the ILO, SIDA and Oxfam GB.

Matteo is an editorial board member of the Review of African Political Economy.

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Matteo's research interests are the economics of Africa, the political economy of development, the present as well as its history with a focus on Eastern Africa (with fieldwork experience in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Liberia). A specialist of Tanzania, and fluent in Swahili, his own work has so far focussed on the history of rural development and agrarian change in Southern Tanzania, economic deregulation, privatisation and urban informal labour markets in Dar es Salaam, development aid effectiveness, and the role (potential or actual) of civil society (NGOs and trade unions) in development. Labour markets, their functioning and their politics, are a theme running through his work to date.

Matteo is a member of the Labour, Movements and Development, Neoliberalism, Globalisation, and States, and Agrarian Change and Development Research Clusters.