Cultivating a New Generation of African Leaders

Geraldine Mukumbi’s father warned her she was making a big mistake. Enrolling in the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg was a gamble, he said. Yes, the school offered an enticing blend of rigorous academics, entrepreneurship, and African studies — but it had not yet graduated a single student.

Mukumbi was willing to take a chance. “The promise of doing education differently was very appealing to me,” she says. She enrolled in 2009 and found herself very much at home in the boarding school’s second class.

“In other schooling systems, the quirkiness gets beaten down in the pursuit of uniformity. But ALA created an environment where you could be celebrated for thinking differently and trying to engage with your community and school,” she says. “Teachers made space for that and encouraged it.” The Zimbabwe native graduated in 2011, later taught at ALA, was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, and is working toward a doctorate in curriculum studies and teacher education at Stanford.

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Fred Swaniker, MBA ’04 | Courtesy

Mukumbi is one of nearly 1,600 young Africans whose education, careers, and dreams have been molded by their experiences at the academy, which was founded by Fred Swaniker, MBA ’04, and Chris Bradford, MBA ’05/MA ’06. They envisioned a school to prepare the brightest teens from across the continent to launch companies, tackle pressing social and economic challenges, and return to their countries after college to become changemakers, leaders, and visionaries.

To say that the African Leadership Academy has succeeded is an understatement. Its graduates include two Rhodes Scholars, a member of Lesotho’s parliament, Kenya’s youngest senator, the founder of a hospital, and entrepreneurs, software engineers, and artists across Africa. Its alumni have enrolled at more than 300 universities in 58 countries.

“I’m blown away by our graduates and the transformation they’re driving,” Swaniker says in an email interview. “It’s a product of the enormous efforts of every faculty member, every member of staff, every donor and global advisor, and every sponsor who has given their time to speak to our students, mentor them, collaborate with them, and hire them.”

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Chris Bradford, MBA ’05/MA ’06 | Courtesy

The academy began with 100 students from 29 African countries and 40 staff members on a rented 20-acre campus. Today, it has 125 students from 46 countries. The school has purchased the property, which includes new dorms and a library, as well as a remodeled auditorium, classrooms, and lab space for its two-year diploma program. “What we’ve achieved has exceeded our wildest expectations,” Swaniker says. “And it all started at Stanford GSB.”

Swaniker and Bradford coauthored the original business plan for ALA as part of a class at the GSB called Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities. “Some of our greatest supporters and donors have come through Stanford’s GSB network, including many of my professors, like the legendary Irv Grousbeck, John Morgridge, and Jim Ellis,” Swaniker says. “The connections and opportunities opened to us through the Stanford network have been incredible and often lifesaving.”

Swaniker and Bradford led the school in its early years, and although they retain leadership roles — Swaniker serves on the academy’s board of trustees, which is headed by Bradford — they are focused on succession planning and long-term financial security to propel the academy through the 21st century.

They knew they needed to find sources of revenue besides tuition to fund the nonprofit school. Students are asked to pay what they can to attend, even if it is a nominal amount. That was a challenge for teens who came from refugee camps or had experienced homelessness. Nearly all students receive scholarships in the form of loans that are forgiven if they return to Africa by age 25.

The academy generates about a third of its operating budget from revenue from its diploma program, summer programs, and a collaboration with the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in Washington, D.C. The African Leadership Academy has forged what Swaniker calls “a clear path to financial stability,” including a $40 million endowment. Its leaders want to grow that amount to $50 million by 2026 and $100 million by 2029.

The faculty is also wrestling with balancing the benefits of technology and an education that instills the basics. “We believe that deep, powerful learning comes from deep, extended focus,” Swaniker says. “To this end, we believe that the most powerful learning technologies have existed for millennia: reading, writing, and discussion. These keystone practices must be protected, fostered, and leveraged.”

Another long-term goal is 70% of alumni aged 25 and older working in Africa. Alumni feel the powerful pull of their homelands and know their skills are needed there, but their thirst for education also inspires them to pursue graduate degrees, often in other countries. Alumna Tsion Tesfaye, a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, worked for a nonprofit in her homeland of Ethiopia after earning her college degree but felt unprepared for the leadership role she wanted to play.

“You have a lot of the vision. You have a lot of the drive. You have a lot of passion to make it come true, but if you don’t have the particular skills, I felt like I was almost adding to the problem as opposed to adding to the solution because I was very premature in my own career,” says Tesfaye, a Boston-based data scientist.

“I decided to make the difficult decision to invest in myself for a bit, and then I would be ready to return. But going back is definitely the eventual vision. I think ALA initially envisioned most of us returning at a much younger age, but they’re now realizing that might have been a bit premature.”

The school has catalyzed educational programs worldwide that blend academics and entrepreneurship. Slovakia’s LEAF Academy was founded by ALA leaders. The Latin American Leadership Academy in Medellín, Colombia, was launched in 2017 by Diego Ontaneda Benavides, MBA ’18, who had served as Bradford’s chief of staff at ALA. “We take great pride in these global spinoffs,” Swaniker says. “Our alumni collectively run schools that educate more than 10 times the number of students we are educating at ALA,” including a school in South Sudan.

The African Leadership Academy, its alumni, and their innovative approach to education continue to have an outsized impact on education throughout Africa, Tesfaye says. “Even if people haven’t necessarily gone through the academy, the academy has had a large butterfly effect just because of its existence,” she says. “It has had a ripple effect on making leadership and entrepreneurship the focus of the next generation.”