I am an African. I was born in Ghana and grew up in the Gambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. I have worked in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and Tanzania. With each part of Africa I lived in, I fell more deeply in love with my continent, and with this love came a strong desire to see Africa prosper.
And so I kept asking myself the question “what will it take to make Africa prosper?” To answer this question, I looked at how other societies had come to enjoy widespread peace and prosperity. What I realized was that those societies 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.
I realized that if we are to sustain and accelerate Africa’s development, however, we must be more systematic about cultivating these leaders. We must be proactive about increasing the number of individuals who can conceive of important new ideas and implement them. Through the African Leadership Academy, I hope to create a powerful new system for supporting and growing these young leaders of Africa.
I co-founded the African Leadership Academy. Our goal is to identify young people throughout the continent—125 each and every year—that we believe have the potential to develop and implement important new ideas that can transform Africa. We will bring these young people to the Academy for 2 years in a full-time residential program, as a sort of “Rhodes Scholarship” for Africa’s most promising young leaders. This will begin a life-long process of nurturing these amazing people to bring about the change that our beautiful continent so desperately needs.
If we fast forward 50 years, what do we hope to see? By then, African Leadership Academy will have developed over 6000 change agents for Africa. Let’s say 100 of these have helped bring peace and stability as ethical and effective political leaders. Another 100 have contributed significantly to solving Africa’s most pressing health problems. 1,000 have become entrepreneurs – transforming people’s lives, creating jobs, and bringing prosperity to the continent. Others will be central bank governors, university presidents, philosophers, teachers, musicians, doctors, and artists. And maybe just a few will have launched the Microsofts and Googles of Africa, or will have become the Isaac Newtons and Thomas Jeffersons of Africa. Ultimately, these remarkable individuals will work together in teams to make things happen. These are the people who will transform Africa into a peaceful and prosperous continent over the next century.
For several generations, Fred’s family has been involved in the founding of schools in Africa. The many examples of educational entrepreneurs in his family demonstrated to Fred the enormous impact of education in transforming society, and taught Fred how to develop schools of excellence in Africa. Fred first had the idea for African Leadership Academy while living in Nigeria in 2003 and realizing the urgent need to increase the supply of effective and ethical leaders for Africa. He brings deep experience launching and managing private educational institutions of excellence in Africa. Fred helped launch and has been a director of Mount Pleasant English Medium School, one of the top-performing private elementary schools in Botswana. More recently, Fred founded and led the launch of Global Leadership Adventures, a leadership development program for youth throughout the world. In the three years since launch, Global Leadership Adventures has more than doubled its enrolment and expanded to five campuses around the world (Ghana, South Africa, India, Brazil, and Costa Rica.) Fred also gained entrepreneurial experience when he was founding Chief Operating Officer of Synexa Life Sciences, a biotechnology company in Cape Town that today employs 30 South African scientists
Fred holds an MBA degree from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction awarded to the top ten percent of each graduating class. Fred also holds a B.A. degree magna cum laude in economics from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.
