LeadAfrique International placed 2nd at the Africa at the Centre 2026 pitch competition, receiving a cash award to advance its work cultivating the next generation of African leaders.
The recognition came at Africa at the Centre convening: Leading Change, Shifting Power, held in Accra from 1–3 September 2026, bringing together over 200 leaders and development actors from 20 African countries to confront a fundamental question: Who gets to define Africa’s future?
For LeadAfrique, the answer is clear: Africans must.
Drawing on more than a decade of experience since its founding, LeadAfrique presented a bold proposition: Africa's challenge is not a lack of resources or potential, but the need to deliberately cultivate the leadership capable of transforming that potential into responsive, values-based and sustainable development.
At the heart of this vision is the Africa Leadership Toolkit (ALT), LeadAfrique's home-grown eight-step leadership framework.
The ambition now is to connect leadership initiatives across business, public service, academia, faith communities, uniformed services and traditional leadership into a more coordinated African leadership-development ecosystem beginning with the continent's young people.
By August 2027, LeadAfrique aims to have begun bringing together leadership programmes across Africa, identified anchor organisations across the continent's regions, engaged relevant African Union structures, advanced a unified Africa Leadership Development Curriculum and begun adapting it across schools, universities, television, games, summer camps and leadership schools.
The vision is not simply to prepare Africans to take a seat at the table. It is to cultivate leaders who can redefine the agenda at the table and ultimately shape who sits around it.
That ambition speaks directly to the central message of Africa at the Centre: moving beyond conversations about shifting power toward practical systems, partnerships and financing models that place African institutions and communities in the driving seat.
This is an opportunity to plant new seeds for African leadership. Because if Africa is to lead its own development story, it must deliberately cultivate the people capable of leading it.
Africa's future will not only be determined by the resources beneath its soil, but by the quality of the leaders who steward them.
