Professor David Everatt is Co-Principal Investigator of the South African team, and also Co-principal investigator (with Dr Caryn Abrahams) of the Johannesburg-specific part of the South African team of the Centre for Sustainable, Healthy and Learning Cities & Neighbourhood. He is the Head of School at the School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

An historian by training, David rapidly became involved in socio-economic and political research after returning to South Africa in 1990, when the political situation changed. David has over 25 years of applied socio-economic research, most often involving primary (usually quantitative) data. He has worked in South Africa and across much of Anglophone Africa, focusing on governance, youth, democratic transitions, M&E, urban governance, race and nonracialism, politics and political contestation, with a particular focus on youth within this broader palette. He is a long-standing member of the International Sociological Association’s ‘sociology of youth’ committee, where he was Vice-President: Africa and the Middle east for 14 years. He has previously worked in the NGO and private sectors.
David was the founding Director of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), an urban observatory that was a partnership between the universities of the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg, the Gauteng Provincial Government and the South African Local Government Association. Widely regarded as among the best-performing urban observatories globally, the GCRO played a key role in generating fresh primary data, using geo-coded GIS and other visualisation techniques in order to convey the complexities of post-apartheid urbanism and generate political concern with urban issues in South Africa. David has served on a wide range of policy, advisory and implementation structures in South Africa, and is a member of the National Statistics Council.