Robert Van Niekerk served as a youth organiser in the structures of the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front (UDF) and Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) in South Africa in the mid-1980's. As a university student in the late 1980's he was a student activist in the Black Student Society at University of Cape Town where he subsequently completed his undergraduate studies with a BA in English and Industrial Sociology. He worked as a senior researcher in the Education Policy Unit at the University of the Western Cape in the 1990’s, tasked with developing egalitarian policies for the transformation of the system of higher education in South Africa from its apartheid past. While working on completing his PhD at the University of Oxford in the late 1990's he co-established the Centre for the Analysis of SA Social Policy (CASASP) at the University of Oxford which was dedicated to researching evidence-based pro- poor social policies for - and working with - the new national Department of Social Development of a democratic South Africa. After 12 years in Oxford he returned home in 2011 to take up the directorship of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes University where he was tasked with building an academic programme of critical social policy research and teaching and where he also was subsequently appointed the Matthew Goniwe Chair in Social Policy.
In 2018 he left Rhodes University and took up the position of Professor and Chair of Public Governance and Social Policy at the Wits School of Governance. His current research is on the universalisation of health care; the history of social policy and inequality in South Africa; the role of black intellectuals in the development and indigenisation of social democratic thought in South Africa and he co-leads an on-going academic project on 'Cultures of Social Solidarity and Social Emancipation: Reflecting on Cuba in Southern Africa ' with colleagues at the University of Havana as well as academic colleagues in Angola and Mozambique. He currently serves as a member of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on the National Health Insurance (NHI) aimed at universalising the South African health care system. He recently co-authored a book with the late Prof Vishnu Padayachee, 'Shadow of Liberation: Contestation and Compromise in the Economic and Social Policy of the African National Congress, 1943-1996'.
