Bertha Vallejo

TwINS Afrika

Dr. Bertha Vallejo has worked on technological change, learning, and innovation in the Global South. Her research expertise focuses on innovation dynamics, social and transformative innovation, and stakeholder engagement. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics and Policy Studies of Technical Change from the United Nations University (UNU-MERIT), University of Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Bertha has worked more than 20 years in capacity development projects in sub-Saharan Africa. At INGENIO, Bertha will collaborate on capacity development, technological change, and learning processes undertaken in the Global South. She will bring up her experience in contextualization, stakeholder engagement, and after-project sustainability, with a particular emphasis on the African Great Lakes Region and the Horn. She is also part of the Accelerating Vaccine Production in Africa: A Centres of Excellence Initiative Project (AVPA). Under AVPA, she has conducted an extensive meso-level analysis of the Ghana pharmaceutical industry.
Till recently, Bertha was a research associate at the DST/NRF Newton Fund Trilateral Chair in Transformative Innovation, the 4IR, and Sustainable Development at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa). Under this initiative, she worked with the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) at the Water Catchments Experiment in South Africa. Currently, she is a senior researcher at the Knowledge and Innovation Studies (KIS) Chair Group at IHE Delft – Institute for Water Education (the Netherlands), where she works part-time, mostly on large international assignments focusing on stakeholder engagement. She also owns TwINS Afrika, a small consultancy firm specialized in supporting research services.