The African Leadership Academy (ALA) has received a multi-million rand grant from the PMI Educational Foundation (PMIEF). 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. 
 
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 programme 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. 
  
Projections by the United Nations show that the world population will hit 10 billion by 2055. Approximately 95 per cent of this growth will occur in low and middle-income countries.

In particular, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is projected to double by 2050. As of 2022, 40 per cent of Africa’s population was under 15, making it the youngest continent.
 
According to the African Development Bank (ADB), the continent sees some 12 million students graduate each year and compete for three million jobs – resulting in sub-Saharan African youth becoming entrepreneurs by necessity and not by choice.    ALA’s strategy is to train its students in entrepreneurship and project management and enable them to go into communities to train more young people to run and manage businesses. Successful start-ups will create much-needed employment and contribute to the GDP.
   
“By partnering with ALA, we have equipped over 1,700 emerging African leaders with project management skills in recent year and excited about continuing our relationship. Through ALA, we will work to transform Africa by developing a powerful network of young leaders working 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.”

  
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 program that sharpens the leadership and project management skills required to become entrepreneurs definitely helps and yields better results.
   
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.