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Fred Swaniker is a man with big dreams. The serial entrepreneur, best known for his role in establishing and running the African Leadership Academy (ALA), an elite school based in Roodepoort west of Johannesburg, which aims to develop some of the continent’s most talented teens into the leaders of the future, is now hoping to transform university education on the continent.
“Africa will not be able to stand on its own feet unless we develop our own people and develop better leaders,” says Swaniker.
Living in numerous African countries, where he saw the after-effects of bad leadership, instilled in him a determination not just to tackle the symptoms such leadership caused, but to address the problem at the roots.
“Instead of just sitting back and hoping that good leaders drop from the sky for Africa, let’s find a certain way of developing better leaders for the continent,” he says.
From one school…
The ALA, which officially opened in 2008, receives as many as 4 000 applications a year from across the continent, but can only accommodate 250 students at a time.
At the academy, leadership qualities are instilled in these youths by means of a two-year programme that prepares them for university and also gives them a good grounding in entrepreneurial leadership, African studies, writing and rhetoric.
The vision of the school is to “transform Africa by developing a powerful network of over 6 000 leaders who will work together to address Africa’s biggest challenges, achieve extraordinary social impact, and accelerate the continent’s growth trajectory”.
To date, ALA students and alumni have founded 131 profit and non-profit ventures in 21 countries across the continent, created 253 jobs and impacted 6m stakeholders through their work, the ALA says.
Currently, 300 ALA graduates are studying at top universities in the US, including Harvard and Stanford, Swaniker adds.
This, in part, contributed to Swaniker’s dream to expand into university education. “I saw that there’s tremendous hunger for what we’re offering [at ALA] and I thought, ‘How do we give access to more people?’ The second thing that troubled me was we would graduate the young people from the Academy, and then 80% of them would have to leave Africa to go and study at universities in the US. […] I would like to see a graduate go into our own Harvards, Yales and Stanfords.”
He was also concerned that only producing 100 graduates a year was just a “drop in the ocean”.
Instead, he is dreaming of creating an army of tens of thousands of young innovators and entrepreneurs who share the same ethos and understand that leadership is about service, which would allow them to have the desired impact on the continent.
…to universities across Africa
Now Swaniker’s dream is turning into a reality. In October 2015 the first of 25 planned African Leadership Universities (ALUs) on the continent opened its doors in Mauritius.
While this campus currently only has 180 students, the aim is that each campus will eventually have the capacity to accommodate 10 000 students.
“I talk about developing 3m leaders over the next 50 years across Africa through these universities,” says Swaniker.
The next campus is set to open in Rwanda in September, and will offer a part-time MBA programme.
It is aimed at training managers and executives, who will attend classes for a week every four months. The aim is to teach participants “how to do business in the African context, while also developing their leadership skills to become effective business leaders”, he explains.
Innovative teaching methods
Swaniker and his team have developed a learning model that will allow for the delivery of high-quality education at a lower cost by leveraging technology and innovative teaching methods.
In a nutshell, the university has a four-step learning process. In the first phase, called the Discovery phase, students are given an ambiguous problem to solve without prior knowledge of how this can be accomplished.
“The problem with traditional universities is you go to class and they just tell you these facts and figures, but they don’t [necessarily] tell you why you are learning this or how it’s going to be applied,” Swaniker says.
The students then do self-directed online learning from curated curriculum sourced from some of the world’s best universities.
There is also peer learning, where students form syndicate groups of three or four and teach one another what they have learnt from the online curriculum.
“Studies have shown that when you have to teach something to someone else, you learn it much better yourself,” he explains.
The final phase is facilitated group discussions, where a faculty member will be present in the room for the first time to help take the debate further and apply the theory to a real-life situation.
The facilitators are mid-career professionals, retired executives or recent university graduates who are passionate about teaching and good at facilitating discussions.
The students spend eight months on campus and four months working for an employer, who will give them feedback.
By the time they graduate, they have one year of experience in a real-life work environment and a track record of how they have grown as professionals, Swaniker says.
He explains that launching the universities is his “Mount Everest” – the biggest challenge he will ever have to overcome.
“We are 70 employees now and if we hit our objective of 25 campuses, we’ll have 15 000 employees, and we’re going to have to raise billions of dollars to establish operations in multiple cities across Africa. I’ve never done something of this scale before, so will have to grow myself as a leader immensely.”
The Africa Leadership University (ALU)
The first branch of the ALU was officially opened in March in Mauritius. The first cohort of attendees, who will do a foundation course this year, consists of 180 students from 30 African countries.
The foundation course focuses on the following:
1. Data and Decisions: Students will learn to understand data and its implications in the real world.
2. Communicating for Impact: Students will develop the necessary skills to communicate effectively in a professional setting.
3. Projects: During this course, students will be exposed to real-life case studies similar to those in actual working environments.
4. Entrepreneurial Leadership: Students will develop the soft skills needed to become a great leader.
On successfully completing the foundation course, students will move on to the first year of degree studies in computing, business management, social sciences or psychology. The degrees will be offered in partnership with Glasgow Caledonian University.
This article originally appeared in the 7 April 2016 edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
