Dr. Grieve Chelwa is a Zambian national who is currently Associate Professor of Political Economy and Chair of the Social Sciences Department at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University (GSU). In February 2025, he was appointed by the late Pope Francis to serve as a commissioner on the Jubilee Commission on the Debt and Development Crises in the Global South.

He has previously held academic and administrative positions at the New School, the University of Cape Town and Harvard University where he was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Center for African Studies.

He has broad research interests largely in the area of African Economic Development and his work has been published in the Journal of Economic Literature, Daedalus: American Journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Review of Political Economy, Social Science and Medicine, Economy and Society and PLoS One among others.

His latest edited book is titled Can Africans Do Economics? and it argues for a new type of emancipatory policymaking in Africa. Dr. Chelwa holds a PhD in economics from the University of Cape Town and a BA also in economics from the University of Zambia.