"At the heart of what
we're doing is a belief that the main reason why Africa has not met its full
potential today is due to the quality of the leaders that we have. So this is
really an attempt to solve that issue ... the Africa Leadership Academy, is really
saying: let's address (this), instead of trying to deal with all the symptoms
of bad leadership that we have in Africa."
Fred Swaniker
Just like American civil right activist Martin
Luther King Jnr. had a dream of a positive social cause for the world, so did
Ghanaian-born entrepreneur, Fred Swaniker, had a dream not for the equality
between the Blacks and whites but for something of that magnitude, which is to
build a Pan-African school that will navigate the new generation of African
child towards prosperity in future years. His mission was to give the African
child a network of successful peers to tap for job opportunities, mentoring and
career guidance.
Fred’s dream in reality is what is today known as African
Leadership Academy (ALA), a prestigious school in Johannesburg, South Africa;
that equip some of the most talented African youngsters from all African
nations around the globe.
Nurturing relationships with over 2,500 educational institutions
across the continent to identify the most suitable candidates to fulfill these
roles, students of the school are handpicked while the U.N helps to locate
individuals of high potential from various refugee camps. This rigorous
selection process is designed to single out not only the brightest students
from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, but also those who have shown
strong tendencies towards initiative, communication and leadership.
With the vision of creating up to 6,000 new leaders for Africa
through the ALA's leadership program in the next 50 years, Swaniker's dream to
build African Leadership Academy (ALA) was conceptualised while he was working
and living in Nigeria on a microfinance project in 2003. He contemplated that
parents spend as much as $50,000 to send their kids to top schools in the
United Kingdom.
Once, in an interview while he was narrating his vision on the
ALA institution, Swaniker said he asked the question “what will it take to make
Africa prosper?” and according to him, he realised that “those societies (that)
had come to enjoy widespread peace and prosperity… had come to prosper because
people in those societies had developed important new ideas – (some of them
simple, some of them revolutionary) - and implemented these ideas.” He believes
that for Africa to sustain and accelerate development, it must be more
systematic about cultivating these leaders.
“We must be proactive about increasing the number of individuals
who can conceive important new ideas and implement them.”
He later founded ALA alongside Chris Bradford, Peter Mombaur,
and Acha Leke, in 2004 but the institution was officially opened in September
2008 with an initial class of ninety seven students.
However, before ALA was launched, Swaniker had worked with
various organisations and has attended several institutions which nurtured him
to create ALA.
Swaniker has lived in four countries in Africa before the age of
18 including Gambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. As an adult, he has worked in
Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and South Africa. At just 17 years old, and on a gap
year before beginning university, he was appointed headmaster of a school in
Botswana. He says the practical knowledge he gained in his time there gave him
the confidence necessary to achieve success later on in his career and in
setting up ALA.
Swaniker had founded Global Leadership Adventures, a leadership
development program for youth throughout the world which has about five
campuses around the globe (Ghana, South Africa, India, Brazil, and Costa Rica).
He also helped to launch Mount Pleasant English Medium School, one of the
top-performing private elementary schools in Botswana where he served as a
director.
Swaniker had also worked as the founding Chief Operating Officer
of Synexa Life Sciences, a biotechnology company in Cape Town that today
employs 30 South African scientists. He also worked in McKinsey & Company,
where he advised management teams of large companies across Africa. To gain
more knowledge, he went to a business school at Stanford University; there, he
was named an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction awarded to the top ten percent
of each graduating class. Swaniker also holds a BA degree magna cum laude from
Macalester College.
It was during his stay at Stanford that he decided to launch
ALA. But he had a challenge - his current employer then, McKinsey, paid his
$124,000 tution with the condition that he return to work after graduating.
To achieve his dream, Swaniker decided to delegate his idea of
starting a school by taking nine-month leave of absence from McKinsey with the
intention of hiring someone else to launch his school. Instead, in October 2004
he ended up quitting McKinsey and was committed to pay back the full $124,000
tuition credit to his former employer. "I realised I couldn't outsource my
dream," he said.
Coincidentally, his first backers were two managers from
McKinsey. He used their funds, in part, to pay off his debts to the company.
He later sought the help of his mum, Edna Wilhermina Swaniker,
an educator for 29 years, who had started a school in Botswana. But his mum was
not as pleased with the idea as he thought. She didn't speak to Fred for nine
months after he told her of his plans. But in the summer of 2005, his mother
relented and began giving him pieces of what would total a $100,000 donation to
help employ workers.
Swaniker launched ALA with $4 million in donations from Cisco
Systems, former Hewlett-Packard Chief, Carly Fiorina, Intuit co-founder Scott
Cook, former Cisco Systems CEO John Morgridge, Stanford professor Irv Grousbeck
and Derek Schrier of San Francisco hedge fund Farallon, among others. He later
purchased a 20-acre former printing plant, which would become the site of ALA,
and hired 20 teachers from top schools around the globe.
In its first year alone, ALA received an astonishing 1,700 applications
for 104 spots, making his school more competitive than Harvard or Stanford,
which has 7.1 percent and 9.5 percent admission rates, respectively. Every
year, the school gets about 3000 applications, the largest group comes from
Nigeria with about 700 applications.
Swaniker explains that ALA tasks students with starting their
own businesses and working closely with the local communities situated around
the school. They are also taught about the roles of CEOs and CFOs as well as
other senior positions within business, politics and industry. This, he says,
helps prepare them for a future at the very top of the society, whilst
equipping them with the skills "to do something much bigger for the
continent" in the future.
To achieve this goal, ALA teaches a two-year curriculum in
African studies, leadership and entrepreneurship, as well as the usual academic
core subjects. All its faculty members are graduates from universities; most
notably Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and Stanford; and have previously taught at
leading institutions. The Academy’s Board of Advisors is composed of African
and global luminaries in business, leadership development, secondary education,
and social entrepreneurship.
ALA is trying to create leaders in all segments of the society;
including leaders in science and technology, business, politics and
entrepreneurs who can create the millions of jobs that is needed on the
continent.
"Africa won't come out of poverty unless we become
entrepreneurs. But we still cling to our colonial legacy, where you aspire to
(a) comfortable, secure civil job," says Swaniker.
In 2006, Swaniker was recognised alongside ALA co-founder,
Bradford, as one of the 15 best emerging social entrepreneurs in the world, by
Echoing Green. He has also been recognised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as
a Young Global Leader, and was listed on Forbes’ list of top ten young ‘power
men’ in Africa in 2011.
Swaniker was chosen as one of 25 TED Fellows in 2009 and is
a Fellow of the Aspen Institute's Global Leadership Network. He was one of 115
young leaders selected to meet President Obama at the first-ever President’s
Forum for Young African Leaders in 2010.
