By Shipra Prakash
14 August 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: Decades ago, a young 26-year-old man joined the African National Congress (ANC) and after a short time, he was involved in the resistance movement against South Africa’s apartheid regime. He achieved his goal of putting an end to it years later and consequently found himself to have become the leader of his country. This man celebrated his 90th birthday recently. You may have heard of him. His name is Nelson Mandela.
It is the vision of leaders like Mandela that has led to the birth in 2004 of the African Leadership Academy (ALA), which is located in Johannesburg, South Africa. The ultimate goal of the ALA is to teach leadership to students between the ages of 16 and 19.
Fred Swaniker, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the ALA, has a strong record of entrepreneurship. A MBA graduate of Stanford University Graduate School of Business, he has launched and managed private educational institutions in Africa such as the Mount Pleasant English Medium School in Botswana. This school has a record of high performance.
In 2006, he and Chris Bradford, another Founder of the ALA, were recognized by Echoing Green as “two of the 15 best emerging social entrepreneurs of the world.”
Swaniker has also lived and worked in six African nations and his experiences have taught him the value of leadership.
“I am from Ghana, but I lived in different parts of Africa. After all of my experiences, I realized the most critical issue in Africa is leadership. Africa needs effective leadership. For example, in Zimbabwe, there’s been a lot of development but in a few years that disappeared because of no leadership,” he said in an interview with MediaGlobal.
Swaniker’s decision to create a leadership school was also influenced by observing his mother. “I was inspired by my mother, who started a school,” he explained.
A leadership school can give students the chance to live up to their dreams. Take 16 year old Miranda Nyathi, for instance. She is one of the 106 students admitted to the Academy for the coming school year. Nyathi attended Ndzondelelo High School in South Africa, but she was not given opportunities to succeed academically because the teachers’ strike meant that no mathematics teacher was available. So Nyathi decided to teach the students herself.
Now, she dreams of hiring teachers throughout South Africa, after she graduates from the ALA. She will more likely than not accomplish this if the ALA succeeds in instilling leadership in her.
The design of ALA’s curriculum can be considered to be an effective tool for this: the two year intensive program not only gives students an academic grounding, but also provides courses in leadership, entrepreneurship and African Studies. “There is academic study and leadership, where students study different theories of leadership. They study individuals such as Aristotle, so students see how such individuals have changed societies,” Swaniker said.
It is only unfortunate that so few are selected. “We received 17,000 applications this year, but accepted only 106 students – six percent,” Swaniker said. Why does the ALA have a minute acceptance rate?
“We believe it takes only a few exceptionally talented people to help bring a tremendous transformation. In South Africa, it took one person: Nelson Mandela,” Swaniker replied.