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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2022

Krystal Strong  and
Christiana Kallon Kelly
Krystal Strong*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
Christiana Kallon Kelly*
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA
*
Email: kstrong@upenn.edu
Email: ckallon@upenn.edu
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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.

Keywords

AfricayouthAfrican leadershipleadership developmenteducationdevelopment
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 217 - 238
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Jennifer Moore for editorial support on earlier versions of this manuscript and Folakemi Alli-Balogun, Fortunate Ekwuruke, Aseal Saed, and Rehana Odendaal for research support. We are also thankful for the feedback of two anonymous reviewers who invited us to grapple with the political stakes of this emerging phenomenon more explicitly. Funding for this project was provided by the University of Pennsylvania University Research Foundation grant. All lapses are our own.

References

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