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About
Her research focuses on the intersection between China’s outward economic engagement and Africa’s development trajectories. She studies the internationalisation of Chinese capital in the trade, manufacturing, and infrastructure sectors in Africa, with particular emphasis on the role of embeddedness in shaping the spatial expansion of Chinese companies.
She joined the Global Development Institute as a Lecturer in Global Development – Global Political Economy in 2023 and was awarded a post-doctoral research fellowship shortly thereafter. In September 2026, she will transition to the position of Lecturer in Globalisation, Trade and Development. She is also affiliated with the University of Ghana.
She is the co-convenor of the Rising Powers Study Group of the Development Studies Association and the co-founder and co-convenor of The New South Working Group of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.
She currently holds a three-year Hallsworth Fellowship in Political Economy for the project “African hubs, Chinese trade, and global circulation,” which examines the implications of the growing presence of Chinese private capital for West African regional integration and industrialisation. Her research specifically investigates the internationalisation trajectories of Chinese private companies in the trade and manufacturing sectors in Ghana and Togo. As part of this work, she also holds a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant for the project “Regulating African markets from afar? Chinese tech giants and South-South trade,” focusing on the trade of Chinese mobile phones in West Africa.
More recently, she has developed an interest in the role of taxation in development. She is the Principal Investigator of the interdisciplinary project “Taxation for Development (T4D): Disaggregating foreign firms’ contributions to Ghana’s domestic tax revenues,” which involves collaboration with the Ghana Revenue Authority and the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration to support fiscal policy reform.
Within GDI, she is the research lead of the Global Production Network, Trade, and Labour research group. She is also pathway lead for the MSc in Global Development (Globalisation, Trade, and Industry) and convenes courses including Globalisation, Trade, and Development.
Previously, she was an LSE Fellow in the International Politics of China at the London School of Economics and Political Science and worked as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Edinburgh.
She obtained her PhD in African Studies from the University of Edinburgh as part of the ERC-funded “African Governance and Space” (AFRIGOS) project led by Paul Nugent. Her doctoral research examined the internationalisation of Chinese state-owned companies in Kenya’s infrastructure sector.
She has also worked as a consultant in the private sector and for government bodies, including the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.