Privilage holds a PhD in Economics from Roma Tre University in Rome, where his research focused on trade policies and agri-food value chains in southern Africa. He subsequently held a research fellowship at the University of Bologna, where he worked on green transitions, climate economics, and supply chains, bringing together environmental and industrial economics in the context of African development. He has also conducted research on EU-Africa trade relations at the European Institute of Policy Research and on trade policy, statistics, and global value chains at the University of Malaysia.

His academic training spans mathematics, econometrics and applied statistics, trade policy analysis, industrial policy design, macroeconomic modelling, climate economics, risk analysis, and impact evaluation. He is proficient in CGE modelling using GEMPACK and the GTAP framework, and applies a full range of quantitative and statistical methods including econometrics using Stata and R, data analysis using Python and SQL, and machine learning methods such as Random Forest. He is a recognised member of the PANAP Network, the Pan-African Network for Economic Analysis of Policies, through which he is currently conducting a competitively funded policy study on the welfare and agri-food value chain implications of the proposed SADC Common External Tariff and AfCFTA liberalisation scenarios.

He works as an economist at UNIDO, specialising in African industrial and trade programmes and contributing to some of the continent's most significant economic initiatives. This work takes him into the processes of the African Union Commission, multiple regional economic communities, and bilateral and multilateral donor institutions. He contributes to intergovernmental processes under the AU system and to analytical work for development finance institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to his current role, Privilage worked in finance at two other UN agencies: the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This institutional background across multiple UN agencies gives him a practical understanding of how development finance, grant management, and institutional resource flows work from the inside.