News
The latest news from the African Leadership Institute and its Fellows. AFLI Fellows are leaders and change-makers, so this section has a lot of news. All text in all of the posts is fully searchable.
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2006 Tutu Fellow Aidan Eyakuze has co-authored an academic article which was published in the Local/ Global Encounters Journal in February 2020. Co-authored with Khalifa Said, a freelance investigative journalist based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the article is titled The Weaponization of Identity and Citizenship: The Case of Tanzania. The article explores the weaponization of identity and citizenship in Tanzania, which is becoming increasingly authoritarian. Aidan is an economist and heads Twaweza East Africa.
It illustrates the types of discrimination that a citizen can face for not affiliating with the ruling political party. Penalties range from unemployment to statelessness; even refugees escaping persecution can’t find refuge and are expelled in such a climate.
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2013 Fellow Ify Malo has been named as one of the African Power & Energy Elites 2020 Projects and Leaders in their annual industry journal. Those selected were named by their industry peers. In a collaborative effort, the African Power & Energy Elites publication and the 2020 African Power, Energy and Water Industry Awards worked together in a unified nomination and selection process.
The journal said that these were people who were leaders in their industry at a time in which the world was entering a Peak Decade that would disrupt business and investment across all sectors. At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, this decade was described as including Peak Globalisation; Peak Capitalism; Peak Inequality; Peak Youth; Peak Climate Change; Peak Oil Demand; Peak Cars - all of which were directly or indirectly connected to the modern power and energy network.
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Project Pakati board member Roseline Zahui from Cote d’Ivoire addressed a high-level engagement at the 4th edition of TEDxGrandBassam. Roseline Zuhai lives in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, with an incurable disease but lives a full life. Today, she works, travels, and enjoys her life as a young woman and activist. Her TED talk was as inspiring as her life.
TEDx is a nonprofit devoted to the spread of ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. It began in 1984 as a conference where technology, entertainment and design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages.
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2015 Tutu Fellow Landry Signé has been appointed to head a new programme at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management, that has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and Globalization 4.0 Initiative. He is the new professor and Founding Co-Director of the inititiative.
The Director General and Dean of Thunderbird, Sanjeev Khagram, says that the school is excited that Landry is joining them. He said Landry 'is a terrific scholar, respected worldwide for his grasp of the political economy of growth, sustainable development, governance, fragile and failed states, regional integration, and business in Africa.
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At around the time the coronavirus outbreak was about to happen, 2013 Tutu Fellow January Makamba was wrapping up a visit to the country. During his time there, he penned a post titled: Letter from China: Two stories and the fortune of nations that provides a great deal of insight into the country.
The political leader and former cabinet minister from Tanzania went to China to see the country first hand. January points out that China is the largest source of imports for 65 countries and that no country has achieved this feat in modern history. He notes that it shrank and completed the basic industrialization process within the span of 30 years, something that took the earlier industrial countries 100 years. This speed and scale has been disorienting to many, he says. The next stage will be even more so because the Chinese think and plan for centuries.
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The detention of 2016 Tutu Fellow, Peter Biar Ajak, has ended. His wife Nyathon Hoth Mai confirmed in a Facebook post that he had been released. His release came several days after his pardon was first announced by South Sudan's President, Salva Kiir.
The activist was detained without trial by the South Sudan National Security Service on 28 July and held for almost a year. When he was finally brought to trial on unsubstantiated charges, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment. President Kiir issued a decree of pardon on 01 January to 30 people, most for minor offenses. Kiir's list also included two critics of his regime - Peter, and Keribino Agok Wol. Both were detained in 2018.
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2010 Fellow Bright Simons spoke to the Daily Nation's technology journalist Faustine Ngila about rethinking the concept of disruption as we head to a new decade. Bright is the President of mPedigree, a social entrepreneurship and technology company perhaps best known for its work in using SMS texts to reduce the counterfeiting fraud of prescription medicines. Recently, his technical paper published by the Centre for Global Development, A Farewell to Disruption in a Post-Platform World, drew global attention as it questioned common narratives such as ‘data is the new oil’ and ‘Big Data is everything’ in a period of rapid technological change.
He spoke to Nation's technology journalist Faustine Ngila about rethinking the concept of disruption as we head to a new decade.
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2017 Tutu Fellow Fayelle Ouane has joined Adenia Partners as an investment manager for their Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) fund. She remains a co-founder and board member at Suguba, the company she and 2019 Tutu Fellow Issam Chleuh started up together. Adenia is a private equity firm that specialises in private capital management, buyouts and investments.
Adenia is active in agribusiness, manufacturing financial services, IT and telecoms, hospitality and healthcare. It has offices in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar and its head office is based in Mauritius. It invests only in companies based in Africa.
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2008 Tutu Fellow Siza Majola has been appointed Managing Director of Crawford Schools, reporting to the Group CEO of the AdvTech Group. She has held a number of key senior positions, with the most recent being Executive of Human Resources at ADvTECH. Siza spent the earlier years of her career working for the international mining giant, Rio Tinto as a Project Geologist and later as Senior Manager for External Affairs for the Africa region. Crawford Schools is a large South African private schools organisation comprising 22 schools from pre primary to college level. It says that it seeks to deliver academic excellence and to build graduates to become well-rounded and confident global influencers. The organisation is more than two decades old.
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2010 Tutu Fellow Edwin Macharia has been elected by Dalberg's equity partners to serve a three-year term beginning on 1 January 2020 as their Global Managing Partner. He will be the fourth Global Managing Partner since Dalberg’s founding in 2001. Dalberg Advisors is a leading global consulting firm and social impact group specializing in inclusive and sustainable business, policy, and investment strategy. Edwin succeeds Yana Kakar who was elected in 2013 and re-elected in 2016, serving the maximum of two terms.
Edwin has been with Dalberg for a little more than a decade, during which time he has served in a range of leadership roles.
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This December saw a day of celebration as a group of 20 pioneering Strathmore University graduates from Kenya and Nigeria marked an important milestone at the innovative AGCO Agribusiness Qualification (AAQ). To commemorate the milestone, a lively graduation ceremony was held at Strathmore University’s campus in Nairobi, Kenya. The event was keynoted by Nuradin Osman, Vice President and General Manager of AGCO for Africa - and a 2013 Tutu Fellow.
In his remarks at a celebratory dinner, Nuradin shared with the gathering how the programme started from a simple conversation he and I held during a November 2016 alumni reunion of the Tutu Fellows at Nirox in South Africa.
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2019 Tutu Fellow Ronak Gopaldas has had a paper, Digital Dictatorship versus Digital Democracy in Africa, published by SAIIA – the South African Institute of International Affairs. The paper kicks off with a quote from writer Umair Haque, ‘Twitter could have been a town square. But now it’s more like a drunken, heaving mosh pit.’ The quote illustrates the gap between the potential of social media and the internet, and its dark side.
Not that long ago, social media fueled the Arab Spring, bringing down governments. Since then, though, bots, trolls and disinformation campaigns pushing trending algorithms have subverted campaigns such as Brexit and the 2016 US elections and how smartphones and privacy have blurred the line between engagement and surveillance.
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2019 Tutu Fellow Sangu Delle delivered the keynote speech at the 65th Annual Employee Benefits Conference in San Diego in October 2019 and his topic was one that is often responded to with discomfort - that of mental health. The conference is the largest gathering of multiemployer and public employee benefit plan representatives, with nearly 5,000 people attending. In prepared remarks, the President of the Foundation, Gene Price, set the tone for Sangu's speech in which he himself shared a personal story that had deeply affected him and he implored all attendees to drop the social pretense and find solutions to help those struggling with mental health issues. Sangu picked up where Gene left off, sharing his own struggles with depression. He recounted how, when stress got to be too much for him, he had to confront his own deep prejudice: that men shouldn't take care of their mental health.
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Mombasa, Kenya ~ February 13-16
Collaborating For Good
Some thoughts about the 2020 Reunion
A key challenge faced by organisations, including AFLI, that run leadership programmes relates to maintaining the passion and drive for change that is ignited amongst the Fellows during the programme, post-programme, when participants go back into the world. Additionally, there is the challenge of integrating newly-graduated Fellows into the existing alumni network.
Typically, Fellows are deeply connected only to other Fellows from their cohort (class) but not to Fellows from other years. Indeed, this undermines the very vision of the AFLI founders and the Institute to curate a network of a critical mass of young leaders that will drive Africa’s transformation, together.
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The basic freedoms of expression, association and assembly have come under unprecedented attack in Tanzania in recent years. New laws have been passed and are being enthusiastically enforced to discourage dissent or views critical or alternative to the official narrative. Journalists have been detained, charged, imprisoned or disappeared and feared dead. Individual citizens have been harassed, arrested, charged and fined for expressing themselves on social media.
Opposition political party activity has been severely curtailed – rallies are banned, leaders are tied up in court on charges of incitement. Apolitical civil society organizations, especially those working in governance and human rights face significant additional scrutiny presumably to encourage their obedience to the government’s agenda.
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- Tanzanian Government gags press freedom event on international journalists' day
- Documentary examines the politics of pesticides
- If Swaziland is to achieve gender equality then women must reclaim their Being-ness.
- ONE talks to Pakati at the Pan-African Youth Forum
- WHO gives Pakati board member global health award
- New Board members for Project Pakati elected
- Tutu Fellow's company wins Nigerian Impact Investing Award
- New Project Manager joins AFLI
- Fellow's malaria project wins US State Department Award
- Tutu Fellow on the front line of the Ebola outbreak in the DRC
