50 Essential Thought Leaders on Tax Strategy in Africa and South America (2026)

Last updated: June 2026

The 50 people on this list represent the most important voices shaping how governments, businesses, and citizens think about tax strategy across two of the most dynamic fiscal reform environments on the planet. As of June 2026, Africa and South America are simultaneously navigating landmark reforms, from Nigeria's sweeping tax simplification legislation that took effect on 1 January 2026 to Brazil's generational overhaul of indirect taxation, and from ATAF's growing coordination of Africa's positions in UN global tax negotiations to the World Inequality Lab's fresh evidence on how deeply regressive tax systems remain across Latin America despite decades of promised reform.

These are not household names in the way that tax reform debates are usually framed from Washington or Brussels. But they should be. They are the researchers who turned Rwanda's tax administration data into a model for how governments in lower-income countries can actually understand and improve compliance. They are the policy architects who drove Nigeria's four landmark tax bills through the Senate in 2025. They are the economists who proved, using Colombia's administrative tax records linked with the Panama Papers, that the wealthiest 0.01% of taxpayers in developing countries hide roughly a third of their wealth offshore. They are building the knowledge base that will determine whether Africa and South America can fund their own development or remain dependent on the shrinking aid budgets of wealthier nations.

Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every global tax list, this directory surfaces the leaders who genuinely deserve to be far better known: practitioners shaping live reform, researchers whose findings are changing what is possible, and advocates fighting for systems that serve everyone.

Jonno White is a leadership consultant who works with leadership teams in financial services, professional services, and public sector organisations to build the communication, accountability, and alignment capabilities that allow organisations to translate external thought leadership into internal action. To discuss how Jonno might support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Tax Strategy in Africa and South America Matters Right Now

Tax strategy in Africa and South America matters right now because both regions are doing something the rest of the world is mostly watching from a distance. They are attempting to redesign fiscal systems at scale, in real time, against the backdrop of declining aid, rising debt, and the urgent need to fund public services from domestic revenue. What happens here in the next decade will shape whether these regions can finance their own development or remain in a cycle of dependency.

Africa's tax-to-GDP ratio averages roughly 16% across the continent, well below the 34% OECD average, a gap that represents hundreds of billions of dollars annually in uncollected revenue. ATAF's collaborative efforts have helped African tax administrations assess revenues worth $5.4 billion over seven years, with $2.5 billion already collected. Zambia's domestic revenue contribution to its national budget is rising from 55.7% in 2020 to a planned 73.1% in 2026, a data point that describes an entire continent's fiscal trajectory in a single number.

In South America, ECLAC's 2026 Fiscal Panorama noted that in a context of persistent fiscal deficits and limited fiscal space, countries in the region face the need to strengthen their tax systems to finance public spending and investment policies. The region's persistent income inequality, where Colombia and Brazil have Gini coefficients above 50 and effective tax rates often decrease for higher incomes rather than increase, makes the design of tax strategy a fundamental question of social justice.

Brazil's consumption tax reform, approved by Constitutional Amendment No. 132 in 2023 and now in active transition from 2026 to 2033, is the most sweeping overhaul of an indirect tax system anywhere in the world in a generation. Replacing five separate taxes with a dual VAT structure of IBS and CBS is a restructuring of how one of the world's ten largest economies allocates the cost of government across its population.

Nigeria's four tax reform bills, signed into law by President Bola Tinubu on 26 June 2025 and effective from 1 January 2026, represent the most significant overhaul of the country's tax architecture since independence. The reforms consolidated fragmented tax agencies into a single Nigeria Revenue Service, exempted Nigerians earning under 800,000 naira annually from income tax, and exempted companies with annual turnover below 50 million naira from company income tax.

Jonno White works with leadership teams in professional services organisations and financial institutions navigating the complexity of operating across these reform environments. For a conversation about how working genius facilitation, leadership alignment, or executive offsite facilitation might help your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on the global landscape of tax strategy, check out my blog post '50 Essential Global Thought Leaders on Tax Strategy' at consultclarity.org/post/global-thought-leaders-tax-strategy.

How This List Was Compiled

Each person on this list was selected on the basis of documented contribution to tax strategy, policy, administration, or research as it relates to Africa and South America, active public engagement with the ideas and debates shaping these fields in 2025 and 2026, and the genuine breadth and depth of what they have published, built, or done. The list spans government ministers, revenue authority leaders, academic researchers, practitioners, civil society advocates, and data scientists. Geographic diversity across both continents, gender balance, and disciplinary diversity were all factors in the final selection.

Category 1: African Tax Policy Architects and Reform Leaders

The people in this category are either currently responsible for Africa's major tax reform agendas or have been the primary architects of the institutions that make those agendas possible. Their work is playing out in real legislation, real negotiations, and real revenue outcomes.

1. Taiwo Oyedele

Nigeria's most consequential tax reformer and, as of 21 April 2026, the country's Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy. Before this appointment, Oyedele spent 22 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, rising to become Fiscal Policy Partner and Africa Tax Leader. In August 2023, President Bola Tinubu appointed him to chair the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, where he produced four landmark bills that were passed by the Senate, signed into law on 26 June 2025, and took effect on 1 January 2026.

The reforms Oyedele designed consolidated Nigeria's fragmented tax agencies into a single Nigeria Revenue Service, introduced zero income tax for Nigerians earning under 800,000 naira annually, and exempted small businesses with annual turnover below 50 million naira from company income tax. A Professor of Practice at Babcock University, adjunct faculty at the University of Lagos, and a LinkedIn Top Voice, Oyedele has contributed to the African Union's Agenda 2063 and the World Bank's Doing Business reports. He is now steering implementation of what he spent three years designing.

2. Mary Baine

The Executive Secretary of the African Tax Administration Forum, a role she assumed on 1 July 2025. Baine succeeded Logan Wort, who had led ATAF since its founding in 2009, and was unanimously endorsed by ATAF's 44 member administrations. Her prior career included serving as Commissioner General of the Rwanda Revenue Authority and Permanent Secretary in Rwanda's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

As ATAF's Deputy Executive Secretary, Baine expanded technical assistance from 9 to 35 countries, created specialised Transfer Pricing Units in 17 African countries, and established Exchange of Information Units in 8 countries. Her vision for ATAF's next chapter is centred on transitioning the organisation from a knowledge-producer to a delivery-focused platform that tracks behavioural changes in tax officials rather than just publishing policy briefs.

3. Thulani Shongwe

The Head of African Multilateral Cooperation at ATAF and the continent's most visible voice in the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation negotiations. As Africa's negotiator at the OECD Inclusive Framework on BEPS, the UN Committee of Experts, and the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee sessions in New York in 2026, Shongwe has articulated what African countries need from global tax reform with unusual clarity.

In January 2026, he led the Africa Negotiators Meeting in Nairobi that prepared African tax administrations for the February UN negotiations, coordinating across 44 member countries to align positions on the fair allocation of taxing rights, taxation of high-net-worth individuals, and mechanisms for dispute prevention. His work exemplifies what it looks like when a continent begins speaking with one voice rather than 54 separate ones.

4. Attiya Waris

The only known Professor of Fiscal Law on the African continent, appointed to her inaugural Chair at the University of Nairobi Faculty of Law, and the UN Independent Expert on Foreign Debt and Human Rights since August 2021. Waris is also a Senior Advisor to the Tax Justice Network, a founding board member of Tax Justice Network Africa and the African Tax Researchers Network, and a member of the International Tax Taskforce on Solidarity Levies.

Her book Tax and Development: Solving Kenya's Fiscal Crisis through Human Rights established the intellectual framework linking tax systems to development outcomes and human rights obligations. She has been cited in the Constitutional Court of Kenya, in a keynote by President Higgins of Ireland in 2024, and at the UNCTAD Debt Conference in March 2025. Her particular contribution is the intellectual architecture that makes it possible to argue, rigorously and legally, that a government's failure to collect adequate tax revenue is a human rights concern.

Book Jonno White to facilitate a leadership offsite or keynote for your team: jonno@consultclarity.org.

5. Belema Obuoforibo

The Director of the IBFD Knowledge Centre, a member of IBFD's Executive Board, and the Chair of the Centre for Studies in African Taxation (CSAT). She is also Extraordinary Lecturer in International Taxation at the University of Pretoria, a member of the UN Subcommittee on Wealth and Solidarity Taxes, and the Director of the annual Africa Tax Symposium, the leading global conference on African taxation.

The 2026 edition of the Africa Tax Symposium, held in Rabat, Morocco in June 2026, was the first time in the Symposium's history that it was held in a North African country, a deliberate signal about the continental ambition of the forum. Before joining IBFD, she worked as a UK-qualified Chartered Tax Adviser in London, and she writes and edits for leading international tax publications including the Bulletin for International Taxation.

6. Edward Kieswetter

The Commissioner-General of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and the Chairperson of ATAF. SARS is the founding member of ATAF, headquartered in Pretoria, and Kieswetter has overseen a period in which SARS has expanded its technological capabilities in data-driven enforcement, illicit trade control, and transfer pricing compliance in ways that are influencing how tax authorities across the continent think about modernisation.

Under Kieswetter, SARS secured South Africa's removal from the FATF grey list, enabling the S&P Global credit-rating upgrade that followed. His public communications about tax administration, compliance culture, and the relationship between a functional revenue authority and the broader social contract make him one of the most articulate voices on what serious tax administration looks like in an African context.

7. Mustapha Ndajiwo

The Founder and Executive Director of the African Centre for Tax and Governance, and currently the Honourable Commissioner of Budget and Planning for Niger State, Nigeria. Ndajiwo is one of the continent's leading voices on the taxation of the digital economy, having authored the ICTD working paper The Taxation of the Digitalised Economy: An African Study, which examined six African countries' approaches to taxing digital businesses and recommended immediate and long-term options available to African countries.

He has consulted for ICTD, the United Nations, Tax Justice Network, and ECOWAS on digital taxation, e-commerce, and Nigeria's tax base challenges. His combination of think-tank work, academic research, and government service makes him one of the rare voices in the African tax space who has genuinely moved between the research side and the implementation side.

Category 2: The ICTD Research Cluster

The International Centre for Tax and Development, based at the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton and led by Giulia Mascagni as Executive Director, is the most influential single research institution focused on taxation in lower-income countries. Eight researchers from this cluster appear on this list because their collective output over the past decade has done more to change what African governments actually know about their tax systems than any other institution.

8. Giulia Mascagni

The Executive Director of the International Centre for Tax and Development since July 2024 and, as of November 2025, a full Professor at the University of Sussex. She is also Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe. In Rwanda, she led large-scale field experiments aimed at understanding the determinants of tax compliance, a body of work that produced some of the most rigorous causal evidence available on why taxpayers in African countries comply or do not.

As ICTD Executive Director, she has steered the centre's contributions to the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville and deepened partnerships with revenue authorities across the continent. Her November 2025 Professorship at Sussex recognised over a decade of policy-impactful, collaborative research with African revenue authorities.

9. Mick Moore

The founding Chief Executive Officer of ICTD from 2010 to 2020, now Senior Fellow, and a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. Appointed OBE in 2021 for services to international development. Co-author, with Wilson Prichard and Odd-Helge Fjeldstad, of Taxing Africa (Zed Books, 2018), named a Foreign Affairs best book of 2019.

Moore's foundational intellectual contribution is the argument that how governments are funded shapes the quality of governance itself. His most recent publications in 2024 and 2025 on taxpayer registration and revenue collection in Malawi demonstrate that his research remains as practically grounded as ever, continuing to produce findings that African tax administrations can directly apply.

10. Wilson Prichard

Associate Professor of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, Chair and Founder of the Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI), and former Executive Director of the ICTD from 2020 to 2024. Co-author of Taxing Africa and Innovations in Tax Compliance: Building Trust, Navigating Politics and Tailoring Reform (World Bank, 2022). Author of Taxation, Responsiveness and Accountability in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Through LoGRI, Prichard has been directly involved in designing and implementing a new property tax system in Freetown, Sierra Leone, that could quintuple revenue. His January 2026 co-authored publication on property tax reform in Sierra Leone is among the most practically useful recent publications on sub-national revenue in the developing world.

Organisations wanting to build leadership capacity to navigate governance and accountability challenges should consider engaging Jonno White for their next executive offsite: jonno@consultclarity.org.

11. Odd-Helge Fjeldstad

Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Extraordinary Professor at the African Tax Institute at the University of Pretoria, and Senior Fellow of ICTD. Co-author of Taxing Africa. With over 9,500 citations on Google Scholar, he is among the most cited researchers globally on the political economy of taxation in developing countries.

Fjeldstad currently directs several research projects on tax compliance and reform in Tanzania and Uganda. His January 2026 co-authored paper on taxation and business development in Zanzibar reflects his continued focus on the practical, country-level evidence base that policy can be built on. His work on fiscal corruption, VAT compliance, and revenue authorities in sub-Saharan Africa has shaped how the entire field conceptualises the gap between what tax systems are designed to do and what they actually do.

12. Martin Hearson

Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and Research Director of the ICTD's International Tax Programme. Author of Imposing Standards: The North-South Dimension to Global Tax Politics (Cornell University Press). His research focuses on the politics of international business taxation, using field interviews, archival documentation, and novel datasets to understand how international tax agreements are negotiated and what lower-income countries get and lose in those negotiations.

In February 2026, Hearson spoke at the Academic Symposium on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation at NYU School of Law. His book Imposing Standards provides the clearest available account of why the international tax rules that govern cross-border income allocation were designed for a world very different from the one African and South American countries now inhabit.

13. Vanessa van den Boogaard

Research Fellow at the ICTD and Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Co-lead of ICTD's research programme on informality and taxation. Winner of the Vincent Lemieux prize for the best PhD thesis in political science in Canada. Member of the UN Subcommittee on Tax and Gender.

Her research investigates how informal taxation operates in contexts like Sierra Leone, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia. Her 2025 policy brief Tax and Gender: Why Informality Matters, co-authored with Max Gallien, Esme Ribault, and Michael Rogan, is the most practically useful thing written on how informal taxation intersects with gender inequality in African contexts.

14. Max Gallien

Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and ICTD, co-lead of the informality and taxation programme alongside Vanessa van den Boogaard. Author of Smugglers and States: Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins (Columbia University Press, 2024), which won the Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the American Political Science Association and the International Political Science Association.

His February 2025 workshop in Ghana, co-hosted with ATAF and WIEGO and convening revenue officials from 16 African countries alongside civil society organisations, produced a Community of Practice on Informality and Tax that is now a live institutional vehicle. His question is more fundamental than most compliance research: who actually has the power to tax, under what conditions, and with what social legitimacy?

15. Giovanni Occhiali

Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and the Research Lead for ICTD's work on taxing high-net-worth individuals. Before joining ICTD, he was a Researcher at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei and an ODI Fellow at the National Revenue Authority of Sierra Leone, where he worked directly with the authority on compliance and capacity.

His October 2025 workshop in Entebbe, Uganda, convening senior officials and technical experts from 14 African countries to compare approaches to taxing high-net-worth individuals, produced directly usable practitioner knowledge. His March 2025 finding that wealthy Africans face lower effective tax rates than average citizens is the kind of concrete, data-grounded claim that makes reform politically actionable.

Category 3: Digital Tax, Technology, and the Future of African Tax Administration

The intersection of digital public infrastructure, tax administration, and compliance behaviour is the fastest-moving space in African tax strategy. E-invoicing, digital identification systems, electronic billing machines, mobile money taxation, and AI-powered risk profiling are transforming what revenue authorities can actually do.

16. Fabrizio Santoro

Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and co-lead of ICTD's Digital Public Infrastructure and Taxation programme. His primary geographic focus is Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana, Eswatini, and Somalia. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex and previously worked as a Research Associate at Innovations for Poverty Action in Myanmar.

His April 2026 co-authored publication on how technology has evolved and changed tax compliance in Rwanda is the most recent output in a sustained programme of research using administrative data from African revenue authorities to evaluate technology interventions. His ATRN Congress masterclass in September 2025, co-delivered with Daisy Ogembo on digital public infrastructure for taxation across Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda, and Senegal, demonstrates the applied, practitioner-facing character of his work.

17. Daisy Ogembo

Research Fellow at the ICTD, joining full-time in May 2025 after a career that included law practice at Oraro and Company Advocates in Nairobi, directing the Strathmore Tax Research Centre, and serving as Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Birmingham. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and a Harvey Fellowship.

Her research focuses on the taxation of hard-to-tax groups, constitutional issues in taxation, and the legal and governance dimensions of digital public infrastructure in tax administration. Her April 2026 co-authored publication with Fabrizio Santoro and Philip Mader reflects sustained, high-output engagement with the most pressing questions in African digital tax administration.

18. Awa Diouf

ICTD researcher specialising in digital taxation and mobile money in Africa, with a particular focus on Francophone Africa and Senegal. Her December 2025 blog on the G20 presidency being held in Africa for the first time and what it means for digital tax transformation, and her January 2026 co-authored piece on VAT on cross-border digital services in Africa following Senegal's adoption, are among the most timely and practically useful pieces published on the topic.

Her contribution to the ICTD's three-year DIGITAX programme, which explored digital financial services taxation across Africa, has helped build the evidence base that African governments are now using to design their digital tax policies. Her geographic focus on Senegal and Francophone Africa addresses a significant gap in a research landscape that has been disproportionately focused on Anglophone East and South Africa.

19. Oyebola Okunogbe

Senior Economist in the World Bank Development Research Group, with a focus on the intersection of development economics, public finance, and political economy. Affiliated with BREAD, CEPR, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and the Nigerian Tax Research Network. She holds a PhD in Public Policy and MPA from Harvard University. Winner of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy Best Paper Award in 2023.

Her landmark paper with Victor Pouliquen on the introduction of electronic tax filing in Ethiopia is now a standard reference in any discussion of technology and taxation in lower-income countries. Her co-authored work with Gabriel Tourek on how lower-income countries can collect more taxes, through technology, tax agents, and politics, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2024, is the most accessible treatment of the practical options available to African tax administrations.

20. Jalia Kangave

A tax researcher with over a decade of experience in taxation, law, and international development, with specific expertise in the taxation of high-net-worth individuals in East Africa. She previously served as the Principal of the East African School of Taxation in Uganda and holds a PhD in Law from the University of British Columbia.

Her November 2025 co-authored research with Giovanni Occhiali and Ronald Waiswa on taxing high-net-worth individuals in Nigeria, published in Development Policy Review, is the most rigorous recent empirical investigation of the practical challenges African tax authorities face when trying to collect from the wealthiest taxpayers. Her career trajectory from practitioner to researcher reflects the growing capacity within the African tax community to produce and use its own evidence.

Category 4: Transfer Pricing and Practitioners in Africa

Transfer pricing, the rules that govern how multinational enterprises price transactions between related entities in different countries, is the battleground on which much of Africa's ability to protect its corporate tax base is fought. The practitioners in this category are on the front line of that effort.

21. Paulinus Iyika

A development finance specialist focused on optimising government revenue mobilisation through efficient fiscal policy design, with expertise in transfer pricing and international tax policy for Nigeria and the broader African region. He is the Nigerian representative to the OECD Inclusive Framework on BEPS, contributing to position papers by the OECD IF working parties, ATAF's Cross-border Technical Committee, and the UN Committee reviewing the Transfer Pricing Practical Manual for developing countries.

His PhD research on international financial inflows, fiscal incentives, and economic growth in emerging market economies examined how FDI and foreign portfolio investment flows respond differently to tax and non-tax incentives. He represents the generation of African practitioners who are moving from simply applying international transfer pricing standards to actively shaping them.

22. Kananelo Lethena

Associate Director in the Transfer Pricing practice at Deloitte Africa Tax and Legal in South Africa, named the ITR EMEA 2023 Transfer Pricing Rising Star by International Tax Review, a designation that recognised both his record of work and his exceptional influence and thought leadership within the industry. He advises clients across automotive, banking and financial services, telecoms, manufacturing, mining, energy, and construction.

His expertise spans transfer pricing documentation, controversy management, and transfer pricing policy design. As multinationals across Africa face heightened scrutiny of their intercompany pricing from both SARS and the ATAF-influenced network of transfer pricing units now established in 17 African countries, Lethena represents the practitioner expertise that enables companies to navigate that environment responsibly.

23. Evadne Bronkhorst

Associate Director of Tax Consulting at Forvis Mazars in South Africa. In a May 2026 article for African Mining Online, following the TPMinds Africa conference held in Johannesburg in March 2026, she articulated the defining challenge of integrated tax strategy in the African business environment: that tax can no longer be treated as a localised finance function that simply ticks a compliance box, but must be viewed as a dynamic, strategic cost component that dictates the ability of a business to continue operating.

Her contribution to the tax strategy conversation is practical and immediate. She works with multinational businesses operating on the continent through a period of rapidly evolving regulatory requirements, and her public engagement at conferences including TPMinds Africa puts her thinking in front of the practitioners who make the day-to-day decisions.

24. Abrams Tagem

A researcher at the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) in Pretoria, whose October 2025 co-authored paper in Health Policy on tax expenditures, budget space, and health outcomes addressed one of the most practically important questions in African fiscal policy: whether the tax incentives governments grant to attract investment actually pay for themselves in health and development outcomes, or whether they represent foregone revenue that should be funding public services.

Tagem's work sits at the intersection of tax policy and development finance, a space that is increasingly urgent as ATAF's analysis shows Africa loses more than $1.43 trillion annually to corruption, illicit financial flows, and systemic inefficiencies. His ATAF affiliation places him at the centre of the technical advisory network supporting 44 African tax administrations.

25. Alexander Ezenagu

Assistant Professor of Taxation and Commercial Law at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar and an ICTD Research Associate. His 2023 ICTD working paper Safe Harbour Regimes in Transfer Pricing: An African Perspective made the case for how African countries could design and deploy safe harbour rules to achieve increased revenue collection and greater certainty for taxpayers, without the administrative burden of full arm's length analysis for every transaction.

His work bridges international tax law and practical African tax administration, arguing that solutions designed for the OECD world need to be redesigned for the African context rather than simply imported. He is among the most technically precise voices on the African transfer pricing landscape.

26. Grieve Chelwa

Associate Professor of Political Economy and Chair of the Department of Social Sciences at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University. Named one of the "10 African Scholars to Watch in 2025" by The Africa Report. A member of the Papal Commission on the Debt and Development Crisis in the Global South. Zambian background, with prior positions at the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business.

Chelwa brings to the African fiscal conversation the political economy lens that is often absent from technical tax discussions: who benefits, who loses, and whether the fiscal choices being made serve Africa's development interests. His work on sovereign debt, illicit financial flows, and the structural conditions that prevent African countries from collecting adequate revenue from their most profitable industries is a necessary counterweight to the optimism that can sometimes characterise reform narratives.

27. Ronald Waiswa

A tax researcher based in Uganda, working with the Uganda Revenue Authority in collaboration with ICTD on the practical design of approaches to taxing high-net-worth individuals. His November 2025 research on high-net-worth taxation in Nigeria, co-authored with Giovanni Occhiali and Jalia Kangave and published in Development Policy Review, represents the growing body of Uganda-based practitioner research that is directly informing how other African revenue authorities think about their most challenging taxpayer segment.

The Uganda Revenue Authority's approach to high-net-worth individual taxation, developed in close collaboration with ICTD, was the model presented to 14 countries at the October 2025 Entebbe workshop. Waiswa's contribution is that he bridges the research-practitioner gap by producing findings from inside a functioning revenue authority that can be directly acted on by peers across the continent.

28. Anthony Munanda

The Head of Domestic Resource Mobilisation at ATAF, a role that makes him one of the most senior technical officials in the continent's central tax capacity-building network. He was part of ATAF's delegation to the Fourth Session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee in New York in 2026, where the Forum took an active role in shaping the text of the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.

His specific portfolio at ATAF focuses on how member countries can strengthen their domestic tax bases, the combination of policy, administration, and political will that determines whether tax-to-GDP ratios actually improve over time.

For organisations operating across multiple African jurisdictions, engaging Jonno White for leadership development or executive team facilitation can help leadership teams build the internal alignment needed to navigate shifting fiscal environments: jonno@consultclarity.org.

Category 5: Latin American Tax Justice, Inequality Research, and Fiscal Architecture

Latin America has the highest income inequality of any region in the world, and its tax systems are a central reason. In most countries across the region, effective tax rates are lower for the wealthiest taxpayers than for the middle class, personal capital income is largely undertaxed, and tax expenditures representing enormous foregone revenue are rarely evaluated. The researchers in this category are documenting these patterns with the precision needed to make reform politically possible.

29. Nora Lustig

Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics at Tulane University and the founding Director of the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Institute. A nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development, and the Inter-American Dialogue. The CEQ methodology she developed was adopted as UN Sustainable Development Goal indicator SDG 10.4.2.

Her 2025 co-authored paper with Facundo Alvaredo, Francois Bourguignon, and Francisco Ferreira, Inequality Bands: Seventy-Five Years of Measuring Income Inequality in Latin America, published in Oxford Open Economics, is the most comprehensive review of what economists actually know about inequality trends in the region since the 1950s. It defines the empirical frontier on one of the most contested questions in Latin American political economy.

30. Jose Antonio Ocampo

Professor at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, member of the UN Committee for Development Policy, and member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT). A former UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, former Executive Secretary of ECLAC, and former Finance Minister of Colombia. Author of Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Ocampo is the most experienced voice on the intersection of Latin American fiscal policy and global economic governance. His role as Colombia's Finance Minister, where he designed the 2022 tax reform that was the only ambitious fiscal bill passed by the Petro government, gives his commentary on tax reform the authority of someone who has actually navigated the political economy of reform at the highest level.

31. Facundo Alvaredo

Co-Director of the World Inequality Database and the World Inequality Lab, Senior Fellow at INET Oxford, and Associate Member at the Paris School of Economics. Argentine background, PhD from the Paris School of Economics. He was one of the five economists who built the World Top Incomes Database in 2011, which became the World Inequality Database.

His 2026 working paper on whether income inequality is increasing everywhere, co-authored with Bourguignon, Ferreira, Lakner, and Lustig, is the current state of the art on global inequality measurement. His specific contribution to the Latin American conversation is detailed data work on Argentina, combined with the methodological innovations needed to combine tax records, surveys, and national accounts in ways that reveal what official statistics conceal.

32. Ignacio Flores

South America and Statistical Methods Coordinator at the World Inequality Database and researcher at the Paris School of Economics and Roma Tre University. His November 2025 technical note on the income inequality series for Latin America provides the most current empirical picture of what is happening to income distribution across the continent.

Flores co-authored the 2025 study on wealth inequality in Latin America from 2000 to 2020 with Mauricio De Rosa and Rafael Carranza, published in Oxford Open Economics. He also created the distribuciones.info platform, an interactive data tool for exploring income inequality estimates across 10 Latin American countries that makes this research directly accessible to practitioners and journalists.

33. Mauricio De Rosa

Researcher at the Institute of Economics (IECON) at the Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay and a Fellow at the World Inequality Lab. His 2025 paper Wealth Inequality in the South: Multi-Source Evidence from Uruguay, published in the Review of Income and Wealth, is the most rigorous available treatment of what wealth inequality actually looks like in Uruguay, using a combination of cadastral administrative data, firm tax records, household wealth survey, and international investment data.

His work is directly relevant to the design of wealth taxes and capital income taxes in the region. The International Tax Observatory's May 2026 report estimated that a 2% minimum wealth tax on centimillionaires in seven Latin American countries could generate an estimated $24 billion annually, and De Rosa's research provides the evidentiary foundation for understanding whether that estimate is credible.

34. Juliana Londono-Velez

Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A 2026 Sloan Research Fellow. Colombian background, PhD from UC Berkeley.

Her 2021 paper Enforcing Wealth Taxes in the Developing World: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Colombia, published in the American Economic Review: Insights, showed that two-fifths of the wealthiest 0.01% of Colombian taxpayers evade taxes, concealing roughly a third of their wealth offshore, and that strengthening enforcement can substantially improve compliance, revenue, and progressivity. Her 2025 co-authored paper with Dario Tortarolo on Argentina's 2016 tax amnesty, published in the Journal of Public Economics, extends these findings to a second major Latin American economy.

35. Dario Tortarolo

Research Economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank, co-lead of the DaTax initiative, and a Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Argentine background, PhD from UC Berkeley, 2020 National Tax Association Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.

In April 2026, Tortarolo met with the head of Argentina's tax administration (ARCA) in Washington to discuss how administrative tax data could strengthen internal processes and support evidence-based policy design. His September 2025 panel at the International Public Finance Conference in Cordoba on reforming Argentina's provincial tax system and his August 2025 IIPF Congress session in Nairobi on research using tax records from Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania show someone moving comfortably between Latin American and African fiscal policy conversations.

36. Andres Velasco

Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics, former Finance Minister of Chile from 2006 to 2010 under President Michelle Bachelet, and a member of the Group of Thirty (appointed December 2025). Co-editor of The London Consensus: Economic Principles for the 21st Century (LSE Press, 2025), co-edited with Tim Besley and Irene Bucelli.

During his tenure as Finance Minister, Velasco built Chile's sovereign wealth fund from the copper windfall, a decision that allowed Chile to deploy counter-cyclical stimulus during the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. As Dean of LSE's School of Public Policy, he sits at the intersection of academic analysis and policy practice, making his monthly Project Syndicate columns on Latin American fiscal strategy useful to any practitioner trying to understand how the region's most reform-minded governments have operated.

37. Mauricio Cardenas

Professor of Professional Practice in Global Leadership at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Former Finance Minister of Colombia from 2012 to 2018 under President Juan Manuel Santos, during which time he led fiscal reforms that cut payroll taxes and criminalised tax evasion for the first time.

As Finance Minister during the collapse of commodity export prices, Cardenas designed an adjustment programme built on what he called intelligent austerity, preserving high investment in education and infrastructure while reducing the fiscal deficit, with results that included sharp reductions in poverty and inequality. His current Columbia research focuses on fiscal management in natural resource-dependent economies.

38. Luis Eduardo Schoueri

Full Professor of Tax Law at the University of Sao Paulo Law School (USP), Vice-President of the Brazilian Institute of Tax Law (IBDT), and a founding partner at Lacaz Martins, Pereira Neto, Gurevich and Schoueri Advogados. His textbook Direito Tributario is now in its 14th edition (2025), making it the most widely assigned tax law textbook in Brazil.

As Brazil enters the transition phase of its IBS and CBS reform from 2026 to 2033, Schoueri is the academic voice most widely consulted on the technical legal questions the reform raises. His 2025 speaking engagements on the non-cumulative application of IBS and CBS, on Pillar Two in Brazil, and on the future of transfer pricing in the Brazilian context demonstrate sustained engagement with the most technically demanding aspects of the current reform environment.

For leadership and facilitation support for your professional services or financial sector team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

39. Tarcisio Diniz Magalhaes

Assistant Professor at the University of Antwerp Faculty of Law, Supervisor at the DigiTax Centre of Excellence, and member of the Antwerp Tax Academy. Named one of the "35 Leaders of the Future in Taxation" by TaxCOOP in 2020. Brazilian background, PhD from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), with postdoctoral work at McGill and IBFD.

His January 2025 working paper with Allison Christians, The Normative Shift in Corporate Tax Policy after GloBE, examines how the GloBE rules under Pillar Two are reshaping the intellectual architecture of international corporate tax policy. His research on sustainability and taxation, exploring how the tax system can be mobilised to address environmental costs that are currently offloaded onto the public, is ahead of the broader conversation in the region.

40. Gabriel Burdin

Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Leeds and a researcher at IZA. Uruguayan background. His research with Mauricio De Rosa, Andrea Vigorito, and Joan Vila on income distribution in Uruguay from 2009 to 2016, using both household surveys and income tax records, has built the most detailed available picture of how inequality has evolved in one Latin American country when administrative data is used alongside survey data.

Burdin's contribution is primarily methodological: he has demonstrated that the official story about declining inequality in Uruguay looks very different depending on whether you use household surveys or tax records, with the tax record data showing significantly less decline at the very top of the distribution. This matters directly for the design of tax policy: if you do not know what inequality actually looks like, you cannot design a system that effectively addresses it.

Category 6: Brazil's Fiscal Transformation

Brazil's 2026 tax reform is the most consequential structural change to a major economy's fiscal architecture in a generation. The people in this category are building the legal frameworks, economic evidence, and political capital that determine whether it succeeds.

41. Pierre Bachas

Research Economist at the World Bank's Development Research Group and a member of the DaTax team. He was among the DaTax economists who participated in the IMF Workshop on Generative AI in March 2025, presenting research on AI applications in tax policy and administration in developing countries, including collaborations with tax authorities in Senegal and Pakistan.

Bachas represents a generation of World Bank researchers who are bridging the gap between African and Latin American fiscal research by deploying similar methodological approaches across both continents. His presence on the DaTax team alongside Tortarolo and Okunogbe reflects how the World Bank is positioning itself as a central node in the emerging global network of administrative tax data research.

42. Marc Morgan

Professor at the Departement d'histoire, economie et societe at the Universite de Geneve and a Fellow at the World Inequality Lab. Uruguayan background. He co-built the distribuciones.info platform alongside Ignacio Flores and Mauricio De Rosa, creating an interactive tool that allows users to explore income inequality estimates across 10 Latin American countries and choose among different distributional indicators.

His research on the disconnect between survey-based and administrative tax data-based inequality estimates raises fundamental questions about whether official statistics are telling policymakers and citizens the truth about where their societies stand. When official Gini coefficients say inequality is falling but tax record-based estimates show it is not, the policy implications are very different.

43. Andrea Vigorito

Researcher at the Instituto de Economia (IECON) at the Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay. Her co-authored research with Gabriel Burdin, Mauricio De Rosa, and Joan Vila on income distribution in Uruguay has built the most detailed available picture of how inequality has evolved in one Latin American country when administrative data is used.

Uruguay's personal income tax system, restored in 2007 after a 33-year interruption, is an unusual natural experiment in the design of progressive income taxation for a middle-income Latin American country. Vigorito's research has demonstrated that redistribution is real but more limited at the top of the distribution than the official narrative suggests, a finding that directly informs the design of further reform.

44. Agustin Redonda

Senior Fellow at the Council on Economic Policies in Switzerland and co-director of the Tax Expenditures Lab, which hosts the Global Tax Expenditures Database (GTED) and the Global Tax Expenditures Transparency Index (GTETI). Argentine background, PhD in Economics from the University of Lugano.

Governments globally forgo approximately 4% of GDP and 25% of tax revenue annually through exemptions, deductions, credits, and preferential rates. Redonda's work makes this invisible fiscal choice visible. His April 2025 co-authored piece with Giovanni Occhiali, Alexandra Readhead, Christian von Haldenwang, and Hazel Granger on rationalising tax expenditures as a FfD4 priority directly connects this research to the live global policy debate about how lower-income countries can close their fiscal gaps without raising headline tax rates.

45. Fernando Haddad

The Minister of Finance of Brazil since 2023 and the chief political steward of Brazil's constitutional tax reform. The reform, approved by Constitutional Amendment No. 132 in 2023 under his leadership, is replacing five indirect taxes with a dual VAT structure of federal CBS and subnational IBS, along with a new selective tax. The transition began in January 2026 with full implementation scheduled for 2033.

FGV IBRE research estimated that tax compliance costs in Brazil represent 0.8% of GDP for large companies and up to 5.8% of GDP for smaller enterprises, costs the destination-based reform aims to dramatically reduce. Haddad's role is not primarily technical; it is political: he persuaded a fragmented Congress to pass the most complex tax reform in Brazilian democratic history.

For leadership teams navigating major organisational transformation, the challenge of building alignment across diverse stakeholders is universal. Jonno White facilitates executive teams through exactly this kind of complexity: jonno@consultclarity.org.

Category 7: South American Tax Data, Transparency, and Enforcement

46. Javier Avila Mahecha

Director of the National Tax Authority of Colombia (DIAN) and co-author with Juliana Londono-Velez of two landmark papers on wealth taxation in Colombia. Their 2021 AER: Insights paper and their 2025 Review of Economic Studies paper on behavioural responses to wealth taxation are among the most rigorous treatments of how wealthy taxpayers respond to tax enforcement in the developing world, using Colombia's administrative data linked with the Panama Papers.

What distinguishes Avila Mahecha is his dual identity as both a practitioner running a major tax authority and a researcher producing publishable academic work from the administrative data he has access to. This combination is rare and enormously valuable for understanding the gap between what tax legislation is designed to do and what it actually achieves.

47. Luis Bertola

Professor at the Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay and a leading economic historian of Latin American development. Co-author, with Jose Antonio Ocampo, of The Economic Development of Latin America since Independence (Oxford University Press, 2012), which provides the most comprehensive long-run account of the structural features that have shaped Latin American fiscal systems from their colonial origins to the present.

Understanding why Latin American tax systems look the way they do requires understanding how they got there, and Bertola's historical perspective is the essential context for the contemporary reform debates. His work raises the question of whether current reforms address the structural features that have made Latin American fiscal systems persistently regressive, or whether they are surface-level changes that leave the underlying architecture intact.

48. Rodrigo Valdes

Director of the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund, a role that gives him the broadest institutional view of Latin American fiscal policy of anyone on this list. He previously served as Finance Minister of Chile from 2015 to 2017 and has held senior positions at the Central Bank of Chile and the World Bank.

His IMF role involves coordinating Article IV consultations, programme negotiations, and technical assistance work across the entire Western Hemisphere. The IMF's engagement with the region's fiscal debates through the Valdes era has shifted toward greater attention to distributional effects of tax reform and to the revenue mobilisation needs of countries trying to fund sustainable development without accumulating unsustainable debt.

49. Carlos Protto

Director General of International Taxation at Argentina's Agencia de Recaudacion y Control Aduanero (ARCA) and a contributor to technical work on digital taxation and tax treaties published in collaboration with ICTD researchers. His March 2026 co-authored piece with Mustapha Ndajiwo, Suranjali Tandon, and Mary Baine is evidence of the cross-continental collaboration between African and Latin American tax officials that is reshaping what the Global South can achieve in international tax negotiations.

Argentina's tax reform agenda under the Milei government has focused on deregulation and simplification, creating a markedly different environment from Brazil's simultaneous expansion of the VAT system. Protto's work on international taxation gives Argentina a voice in the global rule-setting process that determines how multinational profits are taxed in Argentine territory.

50. Sebastian Bustos

Senior Fellow at the Growth Lab at Harvard University's Kennedy School, Chilean background, and former Economic Adviser to Chile's Minister of Finance on capital markets and tax reforms. His co-authored research on Chile's 2012 transfer pricing reform found that the reform led to a significant surge in tax advisory services as multinational corporations sought to minimise compliance costs and engage in more sophisticated tax planning, a finding with direct implications for how developing countries design and sequence transfer pricing reform.

His 2025 working paper on tackling discrepancies in international trade data, co-authored with Ricardo Hausmann and colleagues at the Harvard Growth Lab, has fiscal implications: trade data discrepancies are a primary tool for detecting customs fraud, under-invoicing, and capital flight, all major revenue challenges for Latin American tax authorities.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several researchers and practitioners deserve mention here who did not make the final list. Wilson Prichard's colleague Denis Mukama at the Rwanda Revenue Authority has produced co-authored research with Giulia Mascagni that is directly influencing Rwandan tax administration. Allison Christians at McGill University, Tarcisio Diniz Magalhaes's frequent co-author, is one of the most rigorous voices on international tax law from a developing country perspective. Suranjali Tandon at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in India has contributed to cross-continental digital taxation research with African colleagues. And Lucas Chancel at the World Inequality Lab has co-directed landmark global inequality research that directly informs the policy conversations happening in both regions.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Following Tax Strategy Voices in Africa and South America

The most common mistake is treating African tax strategy as a single conversation. Africa has 54 countries, at least four major legal traditions, and tax systems that range from the relatively sophisticated infrastructure of SARS in South Africa to revenue authorities rebuilding from near-zero. What works as a reform design for a middle-income country with strong administrative data systems may be actively harmful for a country where the first priority is getting basic compliance infrastructure in place.

A second mistake is assuming that the academic evidence translates directly into what is politically feasible. Juliana Londono-Velez and Javier Avila Mahecha's research proves that strengthening enforcement of Colombia's wealth tax substantially improves compliance and revenue. That does not mean a government can simply announce tougher enforcement and have it happen. The political economy of wealth taxation is a separate and equally important layer of analysis.

A third mistake is reading South American inequality research as an argument that tax reform cannot work. The evidence that effective tax rates are lower for the wealthiest taxpayers than for the middle class across most of the region is a description of failure, not a prediction of permanent stasis. Uruguay's 2007 income tax reform has achieved real redistribution. Brazil's IBS and CBS reform will reduce cascading taxes that fall disproportionately on small businesses and lower-income consumers. Reform is possible and is happening.

A fourth mistake is assuming that transfer pricing is only a corporate tax concern. The ATAF initiative to create specialised transfer pricing units in 17 African countries reflects a recognition that how multinational enterprises price their intra-group transactions determines an enormous share of taxable profit. Getting transfer pricing right is one of the most important determinants of how much revenue African governments can raise from the most profitable businesses operating on the continent.

The fifth mistake is conflating illicit financial flows with tax evasion. Illicit financial flows are a broader category that includes the proceeds of corruption, criminal activity, and abusive tax avoidance. The policy tools needed to address them are different for each category, and the voices on this list who work specifically on illicit flows, including Thulani Shongwe at ATAF and Attiya Waris through her UN mandate, are making careful distinctions that matter for how responses are designed.

Implementation Guide: How to Use This List

Start by identifying which of the eight categories is most directly relevant to your current work or context. An executive at a multinational operating across several African jurisdictions who is trying to understand the transfer pricing environment should anchor their reading in Category 4, with Lethena, Iyika, and Ezenagu, and in Category 3, with Okunogbe's work on technology and compliance.

A finance professional in a Brazilian company navigating the 2026 to 2033 IBS and CBS transition should be following Schoueri closely for the legal analysis, Haddad's public statements for the political temperature, and the ECLAC Fiscal Panorama for the regional context.

A researcher, policymaker, or development finance professional trying to understand the long-run trajectory of inequality in South America should be following the World Inequality Lab's Latin America series through Alvaredo, Flores, and De Rosa, and the CEQ Institute's distributional analysis through Lustig.

An African government official working on domestic resource mobilisation strategy should be engaging with the ICTD's work directly, following Mascagni, Moore, Prichard, and their colleagues on the ICTD blog and through the Africa Tax Symposium.

The second step is to follow these voices on LinkedIn rather than waiting for their findings to be filtered through secondary media. The most actionable intelligence in tax strategy in these regions is in the LinkedIn posts of Taiwo Oyedele documenting Nigeria's reform implementation in real time, in Martin Hearson's posts on the UN negotiations, and in Giulia Mascagni's commentary on what the post-aid era means for African fiscal strategy.

The third step is to connect the external landscape to internal action. Understanding where tax strategy in Africa and South America is heading is not an end in itself. It is context for the decisions that leadership teams have to make about how they operate in these environments.

Hire Jonno White to facilitate the executive conversation that translates this external landscape into internal strategy: jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is ATAF and why does it matter?

The African Tax Administration Forum is the continent's central network for improving tax systems, representing 44 member countries. It matters because it is the institutional mechanism through which Africa speaks with one voice in global tax negotiations, provides technical assistance to member administrations, and builds the transfer pricing, exchange of information, and compliance capabilities that determine how much revenue African governments can actually collect. Under new Executive Secretary Mary Baine since July 2025, ATAF is transitioning from a knowledge-producer to a delivery platform focused on tracking measurable behavioural changes in tax officials and revenue outcomes in member countries.

What is Brazil's 2026 tax reform actually changing?

Brazil's constitutional tax reform, transitioning from 2026 to 2033, is replacing five indirect taxes with a dual VAT model: a federal CBS and a subnational IBS, plus a new selective tax on harmful goods. The reform introduces destination-based rather than origin-based taxation, eliminates most of Brazil's 5,000-plus municipal and state tax variations for goods and services, and makes the system non-cumulative so tax is only charged on the value added at each stage. For multinationals operating in Brazil, the implications touch pricing, contracts, compliance systems, and cash flow across every business function.

Who are the most important African voices on international tax reform?

Three people stand out. Thulani Shongwe at ATAF is Africa's primary multilateral negotiator, coordinating 44 member countries' positions at the OECD, the UN, and the G20. Attiya Waris at the University of Nairobi brings the human rights and legal framework that makes it possible to argue Africa's tax policy interests as rights-based claims, not merely economic preferences. Martin Hearson at ICTD provides the academic evidence base on how international tax treaties have historically disadvantaged lower-income countries and what renegotiation could achieve.

How does Latin America compare to Africa on tax strategy reform?

The regions face similar structural challenges but in very different institutional contexts. Both regions have low tax-to-GDP ratios relative to their development financing needs, persistent problems with large-scale tax avoidance at the top of the income distribution, and significant informal economies that are difficult to tax through conventional compliance approaches. The difference is that Latin America has a more developed research infrastructure, more administrative data available to researchers, and a longer history of attempted reform. Africa is investing heavily in building that research and administrative infrastructure, with ICTD and ATAF at the centre.

Is wealth taxation viable in lower-income countries?

The evidence from Colombia and Argentina suggests that wealth taxation is more viable than conventional wisdom assumes, provided enforcement is serious and targeted. Juliana Londono-Velez and Javier Avila Mahecha's research showed that linking voluntary disclosure programmes with the threat of detection from the Panama Papers led to significant improvement in compliance. The International Tax Observatory's May 2026 report estimated that a 2% minimum wealth tax on centimillionaires across seven Latin American countries could generate an estimated $24 billion annually. The political economy of getting there is a separate and harder question than the technical feasibility.

Final Thoughts

The 50 people on this list are doing the work that determines whether Africa and South America can fund their own futures. That is not a rhetorical formulation. It is a description of what is at stake. When researchers at ICTD produce evidence that helps Uganda Revenue Authority design better approaches to taxing high-net-worth individuals, revenue goes up and public services improve. When Taiwo Oyedele designs a reform that exempts Nigerians earning under 800,000 naira from income tax, millions of workers keep more of what they earn. When Juliana Londono-Velez proves that the wealthiest 0.01% of Colombian taxpayers hide a third of their wealth offshore, she creates the evidence base for enforcement that can make the tax system more progressive.

None of this happens automatically. The political economy of reform is always present as a constraint. What they are doing is moving the frontier of what is known and what is possible.

The organisations, leaders, and teams operating across these two regions are navigating environments that are changing faster than any summary list can fully capture. The best preparation is to follow the people who are producing the knowledge in real time. Start with this list.

Jonno White is a leadership consultant and facilitator who works with leadership teams navigating the organisational challenges that accompany major economic and regulatory transformation. To explore how Jonno might support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For thought leaders on tax strategy in other regions, check out '50 Essential Tax Strategy Thought Leaders in the UK and Europe' at consultclarity.org/post/tax-strategy-thought-leaders-uk-europe.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

ATAF (2025). Strengthening Africa's Voice in Global Tax Governance. African Tax Administration Forum.

ECLAC (2026). Fiscal Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean 2026. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

ICTD (2025). Taxing the Wealthy in Lower-Income Countries: Why It's Important, and How to Do It. International Centre for Tax and Development.

IBFD (2026). 11th Africa Tax Symposium, Rabat. International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation.

International Tax Observatory (2026). Progressive Taxation and Inequality: Minimum Taxation of High-Net-Worth Individuals in Latin America and the Caribbean. EU Tax Observatory, Paris School of Economics.

Londono-Velez, J. and Avila-Mahecha, J. (2025). Behavioural Responses to Wealth Taxation: Evidence from Colombia. Review of Economic Studies, 92(4), 2624-2655.

Londono-Velez, J. and Tortarolo, D. (2025). Revealing 21% of GDP in Hidden Assets: Evidence from Argentina. Journal of Public Economics, 250, 105471.

Alvaredo, F., Bourguignon, F., Ferreira, F. and Lustig, N. (2025). Inequality Bands: Seventy-Five Years of Measuring Income Inequality in Latin America. Oxford Open Economics.

Next Read

Tax strategy does not exist in a vacuum. The people on this list are shaping how governments raise the resources they need to fund education, health, and infrastructure. For the voices shaping the same conversation at a global level, the full directory of global tax strategy thought leaders is the natural companion to this one.

For more on the broader global tax strategy landscape, check out my blog post '50 Essential Global Thought Leaders on Tax Strategy' at consultclarity.org/post/global-thought-leaders-tax-strategy.