Grant was born in 1959 and raised in the province of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. He was high-schooled at Maritzburg College in that province, and attended the universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria and Western Cape. His undergraduate and honours degrees were in Forestry and Agriculture respectively, but within a few years of graduating he was spending much of his time in IS/IT related projects, eventually moving full-time to working with relational databases and their applications.
He has also been active in many community development projects in rural African situations, including projects aimed at bringing a broad range of technologies ranging from agricultural technologies to communication technologies, to communities that historically had little or no access to such. This led to a move back to academia when he joined the Institute of Natural Resources of the then University of Natal (now UKZN), and eventually a shift back to the University of the Western Cape where he joined the faculty of economic and management sciences and currently teaches computer science for the IS department. His research has centred around how people learn about technology and learn to use technology. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in information systems. Grant's interests are varied and multitudinous, from aviation to astronomy with a wide range of outdoor pursuits in between, and he has travelled widely in Africa, Europe, parts of Asia and North America.
