Academy Receives Grants To Enhance Entrepreneurial Training

The African Leadership Academy (ALA) has received a multi-million rand grant from the PMI Educational Foundation (PMIEF) to boost entrepreneurial training. 

The grant expands on PMIEF’s current partnership with the ALA, which seeks to introduce students to project management through the Build-in-a-Box curriculum. The curriculum is a portable toolkit that provides content and teaching materials that allows ALA student facilitators to run professional Entrepreneurial Leadership camps in their home countries.

The curriculum is based on BUILD, a unique framework for teaching youth entrepreneurship to fight unemployment and engage them to lead solutions to local problems. ALA works with its students to find partner organisations that they can work with to run a successful and impactful camp in their respective countries. Students enrolled in ALA’s flagship Two Year Program have led and facilitated over 60 Build-in-Box camps for over 2000 of their peers in cities like Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Harare, Bamenda, Kinshasa, and Port Elizabeth.

“By partnering with ALA, we have equipped over 1,700 emerging African leaders with project management skills in the recent year and are excited about continuing our relationship. Through ALA, we will work to transform Africa by developing a powerful network of young leaders who will work together to address Africa’s greatest challenges, achieve extraordinary social impact, and accelerate the continent’s growth trajectory,” said executive director, PMIEF, Dr. Ashley Forsyth.

We are truly excited to collaborate with such an exemplary and impactful organisation, he added. 

According to the ADB, 22 per cent of Africa’s working-age population is starting businesses. This is the highest entrepreneurship rate in the world. The entrepreneurial rate ranges from nine per cent in Algeria to about 40 per cent in Nigeria and Zambia. 

Working with PMIEF, ALA is able to integrate project management skills into their STEM, entrepreneurial, or social impact programming and curricula so that the young people participating can apply these newfound skills to be more successful. 

Quoting Henry Ford, MD of PMI Sub Saharan Africa, George Asamani said: ” A country’s competitiveness starts not on the factory floor or the engineering lab. It starts in the classroom. Passion, attitude, and character are one side of the enterprise coin, and having a programme that sharpens the leadership and project management skills required to become entrepreneurs definitely helps and yields better results. 

“The programme is well-integrated with the industry, and PMI South Africa Chapter volunteers often provide the required support and participate with students in their projects and serve as mentors.

“The programme’s approach is well aligned to this year’s World Youth Skills Day theme – skilling teachers, trainers, and youth for a transformative future. Entrepreneurship has been a driver of global economic growth, and Africa should be no different.”

In the long term, knowledge of project management skills is vital to creating more strategic and collaborative professional future partners and leaders.

The Class of 2023 has 126 students, more than half female, and drawn from 38 countries enrolled in the 2-year diploma. In the traditional sense, the diploma replaces Grades 11 and 12. ALA combines a world-class faculty and unique instructional methods to create a robust student-centered curriculum that is designed to equip the youth with knowledge and inspiration to act as agents of change on the continent.

ALA is an accredited Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) test center, the world’s most popular international examination for high school students and A-Levels and is widely accepted as proof of academic preparedness for entry into universities. 

PMIEF announced more than R92 million worth of global grants this year to help youth-focused non-profits shape the next generation of leaders. These grants will enable recipient organisations to bring project management skills to an additional 2.1 million youth in 2023