Ass. Prof Alex Thomas Ijjo

Associate Professor Alex Thomas Ijjo is a senior academic in the Faculty of Business and Management and currently serves as the Director of the School of Postgraduate Studies and Research at Cavendish University Uganda. In this role, he provides strategic and academic leadership in the development and delivery of postgraduate programs, while promoting a vibrant culture of research and innovation. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Cavendish Journal of Social Sciences and Management (CJSSM), and Associate Editor of the Cavendish International Journal of Science and Technology (CIJST) and the Cavendish University Law Journal (CULJ).

Professor Ijjo holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Bradford (UK), a Licentiate in Development Economics (Summa Cum Laude) from the Pontifical Gregorian University (Italy), and a bachelor of Statistics and Applied Economics from Makerere University (Uganda). His academic career spans over two decades of teaching, research, policy engagement, and institutional leadership.

His expertise lies in development economics, regional integration, trade policy, and industrial competitiveness, with a particular focus on Africa’s structural transformation. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and actively contributes to shaping public policy through research, advisory roles, and board service.

From 2013 to 2016, Professor Ijjo served as Senior Fellow and Head of the Trade and Regional Integration Department at the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), a leading Ugandan policy think-tank. Before that, he lectured in Development Policy and Economics at Makerere University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHUSS) and completed a research internship at the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies (UNU-INTECH), now UNU-MERIT, in the Netherlands.

He served as a member of Uganda’s Technical Working Group on Trade in Services and sits on the Board of Directors of SEATINI-Uganda, a regional organization focused on equitable trade policy. He also maintains active affiliations with the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) and the Uganda Economic Policy Research Network (EPRN).

A dedicated academic mentor, Professor Ijjo has supervised numerous master’s and doctoral research projects and is deeply committed to academic excellence, independent thought, and lifelong learning, values that are rooted in the ethos of critical inquiry and intellectual openness. His scholarly outlook is aptly captured by the Enlightenment principle expressed by Denis Diderot:

“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.” — Denis Diderot (1749)