Youth leadership for development: contradictions of Africa's growing leadership pipeline

Abstract

Over the past decade, hundreds of youth leadership initiatives have been established globally with the mission of grooming a new generation of leaders. This paper examines this largely unstudied and rapidly expanding leadership pipeline based on an ongoing study, which has collected data on 277 programmes that: target African youth, offer educational training or professional development, and have goals of cultivating leaders who will contribute to African development; and interviewed and surveyed 240 youth participants. Our purpose is twofold: (1) we offer an overview of the organisational approaches of these initiatives, which reveal a global ecosystem within and beyond Africa that is investing billions of dollars into youth leadership. Then, using case studies of the African Leadership Academy and University, and the Young African Leadership Initiative, (2) we ask what their tendency toward elite-driven strategies, corporate leadership models, and foreign collaboration may indicate about their larger politics and likely impact.