Giovanni, who was co-supervised by Professors Xiaolan Fu and Diego Sánchez-Ancochea, completed his DPhil in 2018. He also completed the MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy at ODID.

The paper titled 'When value chains go South: Upgrading in the Kenyan leather sector' was based on a chapter of his doctoral thesis. It theorises whether and how links to North-South and South-South value chains differently affect suppliers’ delivery of product quality and value-added tasks, as well as their improvement over time.

The paper can be found here.