[3] Fanaroff was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to parents of Latvian and Lithuanian Jewish origins,[5] and attended Northview High School.
[3][4] He served as head of the Office for the Reconstruction and Development Programme; Deputy director-general of the Department of Safety and Security (1997-2000); Chair of the integrated Justice System Board and Steering Committee for Border Control.
[3][10] In 2003 Fanaroff was appointed the Project Director of South Africa's Square Kilometre Array (SKA) bid,[2][3] a position he held until his retirement in 2015, although he still continued on in an advisory capacity.
To overcome this problem and to supply the project with future skilled South African scientists, engineers and artisans Fanaroff and his colleagues established an artisan training centre in the Karoo and instituted a programme to bring qualified teachers to the local schools, as part of a much larger Human Capital Development programme to train students from South Africa and the rest of Africa from undergraduate to post-doctoral level.
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