Now reading: Louise de Villiers

Louise de Villiers


Louise specialises in survey methodology, questionnaire design and data management, within the financial inclusion field. Prior to joining Cenfri in February 2015, she was a survey manager at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town.

She has 10 years’ experience working on ground-breaking, South African research projects, including:

  • The first Financial Diaries project as a data manager
  • The first national panel in South Africa, the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS)

At NIDS, she was responsible for the project management of this multi-million-rand project during a transitional phase. She oversaw NIDS becoming the first nationally representative panel survey in South Africa, while at the same time becoming the first survey of this magnitude and complexity to make use of computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) technology in South Africa. The survey contacts almost 40,000 people in 10,000 households every two years, and it is conducted in all 11 South African languages in all nine provinces.

She has also consulted to Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the Unilever Institute.

Qualifications
  • MPhil in knowledge management, University of Cape Town
  • Bachelor of business science, University of Cape Town
Recent Work by Louise de Villiers
What can behavioural science tell us about the financial decisions of women?
Women are significantly less likely to use formal banking services than men, due to a range of barriers to access and use. A lack of gender-disagg...
Network analysis to identify and segment farmers
Exploring how transactional-data-driven network analysis can allow financial service providers increase th...
Data in financial service provider (FSP) decision-making: Findings from six countries
Do FSPs in Africa use data to drive their decisions?  While several ...
A woman’s financial life: Does traditional data get it?
Whereas financial inclusion has seen a steady increase over the past few years, this positive trend has not necessarily taken women along. A ...
The many face survey
Traditionally, survey data was collected by fieldworkers trekking across the country, knocking on doors and filling in paper questionnaires. As it ...
Customer views on abuses in the informal funeral parlour market in South Africa
Funeral parlours and burial societies deliver value to consumers by meeting essential functional needs, but also by meeting social and cultural nee...