CHAPTER 13

Africa-America Institute

Developing Leaders for Africa

Melissa Howell

Founded in 1953, the Africa-America Institute (AAI)’s mission is to strengthen human capacity and help to develop effective leaders in Africa. Alumni of AAI’s programs include President Alassane Ouattara of Cote d’Ivoire; Nahas Angula, Namibia’s prime minister from 2005 to 2012; Uganda’s Betty Bigombe, cabinet minister and member of parliament who negotiated with the Lord’s Resistance Army to bring peace to her region; and Kenya’s Wangari Maathai, the 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. In the past 61 years, AAI has served over 23,000 talented men and women committed to improving conditions of life in Africa.

According to the World Bank and the African Development Bank, today’s globalized economy requires a well-skilled workforce with the capacity to accumulate and transfer knowledge. Although many African countries spend a significant portion of their national budgets on education, post-secondary education continues to be a rare commodity across the continent. In South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, countries in which AAI’s Transformational Leadership Program (TLP) currently operates, post-secondary education enrollment ranges from 3% to 15.2% of the adult population, as compared with 72.6% in the United States. These statistics shed little light on the varying cultural influences and structural barriers that promote such disparities on the continent, such as gender norms that deter the education of girls, long commuting distances from educational facilities that restrict enrollment, and inadequate teacher training to provide students access to appropriate levels of education and training. Still, these statistics present a lens through which to understand the increased opportunities and benefits of scholarships and leadership development programs supporting this population.

Initially, AAI was created by President Horace Mann Bond of Lincoln University (PA) and Professor Will Leo Hansberry of Howard University (Washington, DC) to support African students attending colleges and universities in the United States. By the 1990s, AAI’s focus was providing both academic supports and professional skills training. African Nationals could attend programs in either the United States or on the African continent. In the early 2000s, AAI established itself as a thought leader, and used its platform to facilitate increased United States–Africa engagement across government, academic, nonprofit, and business sectors. These efforts laid the foundation for the TLP, designed to develop the capacity of African leaders to address the challenges faced on the African continent.

The Transformational Leadership Program

The need for advanced education and training is pronounced in African nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that deliver some of the most fundamental services to their communities, including health care, housing, education, clean water, and sanitation, yet consistently are under-resourced. Most of the extreme conditions that developing nations face, such as high numbers of impoverished families, increased deaths caused by childbirth, repeated financial limitations that impede school completion, are seemingly inescapable experiences for many communities across the continent.

Developing and implementing best practices are not just a means to organizational success but can be the daily determinants between an individual’s prolonged life or untimely death. Yet, under these same conditions, the inventive and creative solutions developed to combat these needs are restricted to small-scale production and implementation. The TLP was created to bridge the capacity gap of institutions to support NGO leaders. As a result, social sector organizations are better equipped to tackle the myriad challenges they were created to address and reach the levels of scale required to transform communities.

In 2006, AAI created the TLP to increase leadership capacity on the continent by providing training to organization leaders addressing some of the most challenging issues facing the continent. The aim of the program is to create a critical mass of leaders who can transform communities.

How is it that at certain moments and in certain orders of knowledge, there are these sudden take-offs, these hastenings of evolution, these transformations which fail to correspond to the calm, continuist image that is normally accredited?¹—Michel Foucault

In partnerships with the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation (TCCAF) and a select group of university partners in both the United States and Africa, TLP provides training to leaders and increasingly to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With a $2.5 million investment by TCCAF, the Africa-America Institute established its inaugural partnership in 2007 at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Later the same year, AAI partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School.

At the same time, in the field of international development, participatory models of development grew more mainstream as the World Bank called for “country ownership” of poverty reduction policies. These models suggested a redistribution of power from the domestic and foreign stakeholders who normally formulate development policy in heavily indebted countries to marginalized communities traditionally excluded from the policy process.² AAI has aligned the TLP with these more participatory models. The communities once seen only as beneficiaries of services became key players in creating solutions, as when the Chandaria School of Business at the United States International University (USIU) in Kenya became the first partner institution to offer the TLP as a graduate degree program on the continent.

The TLP continued to broaden its scope and began to address other issues with building capacity to support not only current leaders but also the available leadership development structures within multiple communities. AAI sought more partnerships in Africa to mirror its first with USIU, where the local and familiar academic and business contexts are incorporated into training. This allowed participants the opportunity to continue contributing to their communities as opposed to displacing this much-needed city and national support, if even temporarily, from situations that were already critical and systems that were sometimes fragile and collapsible. New institutional partners, such as the Enterprise Development Centre (EDC) of the Pan-Atlantic University (2009) and the University of Stellenbosch Business School–Executive Development (USB-ED) (2011), grew more recognizable as local resources for nongovernmental and social enterprise leadership development to complement their already stellar work with small and midsized enterprises.

The result of these partnerships is a burgeoning social sector. While increasing in their ability to address capacity issues within local and international communities, they continue to struggle with overcoming the lack of reputability and respect that is traditionally afforded the private and governmental sectors.

Program Design

The effectiveness of the TLP is in its ability to train an individual to lead for change and impact through a balanced skill set. The integrated model of leadership theory by Ki ThoughtBridge (Indianapolis, IN) explains this effectiveness through strength in outer work, such as performance and productivity, along with inner work—self-awareness, identifying core guiding values, perceiving and interpreting a larger context, and envisioning a preferred future. Through this approach power is distributed at many levels of an organization, including to those individuals living with and working within the condition that needs to be addressed.

Common across the USIU, EDC, and USB-ED programs is a shared objective to train leaders in managing and operating sustainable enterprises that are able to deliver capacity to communities in their area of focus. These programs include (1) a 1-week extensive training program, (2) an executive education program that leads to a certificate in leadership, and (3) a traditional graduate program in business. The programs share outcomes such as demonstrating clear messaging about goals and program outcomes, rigorous and market-driven structures, and a cohort model that engineers “group make-up and dynamics . . . to reinforce the cognitive and academic aspects of the curriculum with the lived experience and dynamic aspects of instruction.”³

Recruiting and Admissions

Many debilitating stereotypes discredit the social sector. Across Africa, some perceive the social sector as filled with disorganized businesses and led by individuals with weak technical skills, who are often young and unmotivated. However, the recruitment process for the TLP tells a very different story.

Many participants became aware of the program in its earliest stages through their affiliations with the partner institutions or through word of mouth. This speaks to the strength of the networks and organized knowledge sharing throughout the field. This trend continues to be the most influential in identifying new participants.

The TLP provides much-needed scholarship funding, essential to the inclusion of participants from low-income and marginalized groups and communities.

I had been looking forward to and was already exploring websites and hoping that I will find funding some day to attend such course, the moment I learnt about it here in Lagos, I decided instantly to enroll.—EDC TLP alumnus

Although the different program models attract participants in different stages of their career and business development, one measure used to admit participants is the passion exhibited toward their work. There is a direct correlation between the motivation and drive of the participant and the likelihood of selection and completion of the program along with their commitment to increasing program impact over time. Participants told stories of their personal connections to the mission of their organization during their interviews that often showed how relentless they would be in increasing their leadership skills through the program.

Interviewees were asked to show their ability to work in collaborative environments. Beyond just working through a team-based approach, participants were selected based on their examples of working in community. The cohort model is a key strength of the program and facilitates the long-term success of alumni. Therefore, it is important that participants not only exhibit the ability to leverage relationships and be resourceful, but also contribute to the sharing of information and knowledge of other practitioners.

Program Models

Currently, TLP partner institutions have considerable autonomy in administering relevant leadership training with a high level of cultural adaptation within local educational markets. Supporting this “for us, by us” method of design, as management and oversight by AAI increases, the integrity of the program based within the local cultural context remains intact when the institutions are “guided by considerations of effectiveness, with slightly different emphases featured at each iteration.”⁴ Within this method of design, TLP includes the following programs:

• One-Week Intensive Training. The most recent addition to the TLP partnerships at USB-ED is a 1-week intensive certificate program training model. The program, known as “NPO Strategy and Leadership Programme,” covers topics such as “stuckness,” change management and theory of change, and conflict management, an area that 43% of American chief executive officers (CEOs) identified as being of their highest concern.⁵ This training is followed by 10 weeks of on-the-job application and a final report submission.

• Certificate Program. The TLP program at EDC provides 13 modules of technical and leadership training to strengthen the abilities of participants as nonprofit CEOs in 30 days over 6 months. Also known as the Social Sector Management (SSM) program, this program follows an executive education model training and builds upon intensive engagement in day-long immersion coursework.

• Traditional Graduate Program. At USIU, the TLP offers a traditional university graduate model with a required master’s thesis and grades tied to coursework. Sharon Ravitch and Michael Reichert noted an impressively high level of faculty and advisor interaction to support the high level of rigor and high-quality standards expected of each TLP participant. At USIU, the TLP, also referred to as the Executive Master’s in Organizational Development (EMOD) program, requires 30 credit hours for completion.

Through these various models, the TLP teaches participants to define clear objectives and in turn more easily align missions and visions with strategic planning. From developing communication pathways and knowledge transfer systems, to using data to guide program improvement, to making informed decisions on creating new operational policies and procedures, the TLP impacts organizations in ways that will have a long-lasting effect on productivity and efficiency.

Program Impact

To provide an overall sense of participants’ experiences with the TLP, AAI commissioned a third-party evaluation in 2013.⁶ The evaluation surveyed TLP graduates and participants representing a wide variety of roles in NGOs, which included many CEOs and other top-level administrators. The survey included several quantitative questions, in which respondents were asked to rate the program on a five-point scale.

After 7 years of operation, program growth, and evolution, the TLP has reached more than 360 participants through its university programs, and an additional 650+ participants from the broader social sector through industry-relevant meetings, conventions, and symposia. The TLP programs have a 90% completion rate. From the development of a broad range of highly skilled individual leaders, improved efficiencies of the organizations, increased capacity of the community, and increased professionalism, credibility, and employability of members within the social sector, each participant organization impacts between one hundred and one million beneficiaries.

Across four dimensions (mission and goals, quality of content, quality of instruction, and value added to knowledge and skills), program completers were very happy with their experience: 99.7% to 100% of respondents rated the program as very good or great. In terms of the sustainability of the skills learned, participants also rated the program high: 98.5% good to great in terms of sustainability in the organizations, and 95.3% in the communities served by the organizations.

In addition to the surveys, the evaluators also conducted individual interviews, focus groups, and site visits to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the overall impact of the TLP. These qualitative data indicate that the major impact area for the TLP was on the organizations led by program graduates, namely changes in the structure, functioning, and capacity of each to better achieve their goals and missions. Having learned new approaches to management and increasing their overall effectiveness as leaders, participants lauded the innovation, improvement, and expansion as major breakthroughs achieved from participation in the program. Acquiring new management strategies, particularly through developing new tools and habits of self-appraisal, helped participants to focus on their individual leadership capacity, while they were able to look beyond donor dependency and fund-raising to build organizational capacity and sustainability.

Exhibit 13-1.   Participant satisfaction with program.

Exhibit 13-2.   Participate Rating of Sustainability.

Across all three programs, participants and alumni spoke in strong terms about how they not only gained necessary leadership skills, but also developed a more wide-ranging and critical sensibility as leaders of organizations in the social sector at this moment of their country’s development. Many described a broad and deep professionalization of leadership, and emphasized its impact on their approach in organizational development.

The TLP’s emphasis on stakeholder and client satisfaction in the social sector dramatically changed the way participants considered the potential impact of the work their organizations do and thus how they function in relation to their clients. The need for community-based relationships was core to that teaching and in ensuring that the NGO itself is effective in serving its stakeholders’ needs. The impact of the TLP on community—both the communities served by participants’ organizations as well as, for some, their personal home communities—was commonly noted as a result of the program, which empowered them to expand their visions and the scope of their ambitions for their client-serving, community-based organizations. Newly confident because of the skills and approaches they learned, these leaders grew their organizations both numerically and qualitatively as their service to communities deepened and grew.

The furthest reach and impact supported by the TLP includes the social sector as a whole. As a result of the emphasis university partners placed on tailoring curriculum for this level of impact, TLP graduates have begun to re-envision the social sector itself as a site of necessary innovation and a conduit for formalized knowledge sharing. This ambition connects directly with the leaders’ own goals for professionalization and for increased credibility for the sector. For example, two graduates of the TLP in Lagos currently publish new professional journals. Graduates from both the EDC and USIU have expressed their desire for the TLP’s support to develop post-program institutes for professional dialogue and exchange.

Given that one of the key structures for the TLP is to encourage professional exchange, it is not surprising to find that participants seek opportunities to collaborate, and there is an almost insatiable desire to increase the frequency of these opportunities. This is a part of how the TLP training has led participants to reimagine the social sector. In fact, the thrust of the program is to expand participants’ perspectives on their work and to think beyond the individuals in the sector to the collective.

After completion of the course, I was able to look at my society and think of how I, too, could transform people’s lives. I established an NGO, to take care of the widows and youths generally in my state. After the course, I was also able to employ more people, as I created more business avenues.—USIU TLP Graduate

[A worker] comes from a very remote area, 400 km/8 hours away. He works for a farmer organization that had no system of operation. Through EMOD he was able to identify the organization’s needs, see the lack of capacity, and have me [associate dean] come to help them plan. I helped him develop a business case for funding and to develop job description and change management plan.—USIU TLP Staff

Reimagining possibilities for the sector, including reframing organizations as social enterprises rather than not for profit, was at the core of the EDC model. This vision of sustainability through entrepreneurial thinking and cutting-edge organizational strategy was liberating to many. Adding to this, the program’s emphasis on teamwork and collaboration shifted the role in which identity was understood, and a key impact of the program was that participants, alumni, faculty, and administrators no longer viewed identity (including tribal origin and gender) as a concern or potential to undermine the field/sector itself.

The participants grew to understand the significance of the perception and reputation of the sector as professional and systematic. They also learned that the sector must be viewed as improving and having strong standards of accountability.

While usually focused quite locally in their operations, participants spoke of strategic visions that extended well beyond their immediate constituents. A number of participants, alumni and faculty described the TLP as an incubator for a shared vision to transform the social sector, its leadership, and the African Continent as a whole.

As leaders reimagine their communities and re-envision their roles, the necessary training structures will also need to be reimagined to adapt to this new, profound level of leadership.

Conclusion

The TLP’s structure—systems of program development between AAI and partner universities; the commitment of funding partners and stakeholders—exemplifies the commitment it takes and systems needed to increase and expand the opportunities available for NGO and SME leaders. Program graduates include such leaders as Sophia Abdi-Noor, USIU TLP graduate, who left the small village of Garissa in northern Kenya, where women are typically marginalized within her community, and become a sponsored participant. The program offered skills training, which she intended to use to serve the local needs and girls within her community. Ultimately, the program increased her technical ability to partner WomenKind Kenya with 32 other organizations, and propelled her career into membership of the 10th parliament of Kenya, where she served as contributor to the Kenyan constitution.

The AAI has identified two essential elements to successfully implement effective education programs for adults: a distinct set of stakeholders and common belief systems. There are four key stakeholders whose engagement supports successful programs: (1) the local community, (2) the program management, (3) the program participants, and (4) the organizations that employ participants. These stakeholders are better partners when they share some core beliefs. In the case of TLP, the following common beliefs strengthen our programs:

• Participation and Agency. The program must continue to challenge and explore the relationships of power, the understanding of who is to be empowered and by whom, as well as concepts such as ownership, accountability, and agency as forms of participation. This is particularly crucial in an international development context. “Country ownership” has become the preferred poverty assistance strategy, with citizens of the developing nations asserting agency over social and economic policies in their country. However, as occurs in many cases, development activities might stem from international governmental agencies, so participants in the TLP take on “country ownership” as their responsibility as NGOs and duty as community members.

• Models of Inclusion. According to Rebecca Rogers, “Critical discourse analysis asserts that knowledge is socially constructed and shaped by relations of power that are both material and discursive. It rejects the premises of structuralism and instead embraces the view that certain meaning systems—or discourses—are privileged by their relationship with dominant groups in society and are, themselves, constitutive of social relations.”⁷ Therefore, it is important that program administrators and funders realize the critical import of including marginalized participants in the program.

• Community as Partners and Community Leaders as the Source for Building Capacity. As referenced earlier, the term partnership most often refers to external partners (international partners, trading partners, etc.) and not to communities. Within the development world, communities are often marginalized when defined as service beneficiaries and in some cases as administrators of externally or predetermined tasks in which they become empowered by other partners, including government. However, the TLP case recognizes that community-level input on how to address social capacity issues is critical to informing strategy and identifying or creating viable solutions, making community one of the best strategic partners.

• Expansion and Replication. In a relatively short period of time, the TLP has developed its own reputation, offering high-quality training, building credibility for the social sector, increasing institutional capacity, and creating the next generation of leaders across the continent of Africa. Yet even with this solid history, it is evident that the reach of the TLP has barely touched even just the tip of the iceberg.

As a result, AAI has paid close attention to the needs of the TLP stakeholders and set clear objectives for expanding and increasing the impact of the TLP through three new and innovative initiatives:

1. Manage the traditional TLP program model with specific focus on sustaining the strong institutional relationships and connections established between local university partners and global funding partners, like TCCAF by increasing the quantity and diversity of courses, degrees, and certifications offered. Provide opportunities for partner institutions to learn best practices from one another and for TLP alumni to further their training.

2. Expand the reach of the program by recruiting three additional partner institutions that will collectively train an average of 500 participants per year in the traditional TLP model.

3. Create more efficiency and access to the TLP trainings through an online platform, which will offer leadership, management, and entrepreneurship courses to reach thousands of new participants.

Specifically, AAI has identified six major areas for expansion that were suggested in the interviews and focus groups conducted as part of the program evaluation. It is understood that participants and alumni already see the TLP as a high-quality and valued community resource. To further address capacity issues, AAI will expand TLP services to include the following: advocate for the social sector and increase credibility in the field by positioning university partners as centers for excellence and participants as social change agents and thought leaders; build an online platform to increase access to potential participants in remote areas; offer post-training support and continuing education; increase access for specific constituencies and marginalized groups; increase and clearly define monitoring and evaluation procedures of each program site; and replicate the program in additional locations.

The value of the TLP extends beyond the design and structure of the program itself. The TLP engages and impacts multiple levels of stakeholders through many transformative qualities. It supports reviewing participants as leadership practice, re-envisioning roles and responsibilities, redefining organizations’ missions, and re-envisioning the impact of the sector. Further, it encourages participants to transition from cohort to community, and commit to knowledge sharing and to creating a support system that helps to build the capacity of each organization. As a result of this collective impact, the TLP has successfully trained the leader and increased the credibility of the sector.

The TLP graduates not only are leading organizations but also are sharing best practices, informing and educating the sector, and extending their collective impact in all directions. Along with local community members, particularly those serving formally and informally as organizers and influencers, TLP graduates are creating a demand for the formalization of the social sector and demanding legitimacy and validation of their ability to organize, inform, and influence outside of a professionally structured education model. As a result of this shift, programs such as the TLP serve to address the need almost simultaneously with its being defined. The program itself is a proven contributor to local economic success, and the area of leadership development is a means to sustain it and the community at large.

Notes

1. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Random House.

2. Vavrus, F. & Seghers, M. (2010). “Critical discourse analysis in comparative education: a discursive study of ‘partnership’ in Tanzania’s poverty reduction policies.” Comparative Education Review, 54(1).

3. Ravitch, S. & Reichert, M. (2013). The Transformational Leadership Program of the Africa-America Institute: An Evaluation of Participants’ Experiences and Program Impact. New York: The Africa-America Institute.

4. Ibid.

5. Larker, D. & Miles, S. (2013). 2013 Executive Coaching Survey. Palo Alto: Stanford Graduate School of Business. http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/cldr/research/surveys/coaching.html.

6. Ravitch & Reichert, The Transformational Leadership Program.

7. Rogers, R. (2004). Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.