{ Case Study II · 2012 – 2020 }
Building the ALA
Model African Union
Developing Ideas, Building Institutions, Leading People
- Period
- 2012 – 2020
- Institution
- African Leadership Academy, Johannesburg
- Role
- Founder & Director, International Relations Council
I.The Challenge and the Opportunity
When I arrived at African Leadership Academy (ALA) in August 2012, I found a campus full of young African students who were both intellectually energized and radically optimistic about the continent’s future. They were hungry for a forum through which their ideas could be tested against the complexity of African politics, governance, and international affairs.
There was also a gap. ALA was founded to transform Africa by identifying, developing and connecting its future leaders. Four years in, the Academy had already developed a distinctive model for cultivating entrepreneurial leaders. What it had not yet built was a structured platform for developing the diplomatic dimension of leadership: the capacity to understand how multilateral institutions work, to represent positions not one’s own, to negotiate without compromising principles, and to think in terms of systems rather than individual ambition.
Like most young Africans, I was raised on a daily diet of newspapers and a deep scepticism of government. I had internalised the knowledge that politics was a no-go area before I had words for it, yet the questions of public leadership never went away. I was searching for a way to change citizens’ relationship to public institutions without succumbing to either naive idealism or corrosive cynicism. I had come to believe that the problem was not the institutions themselves, but the quality of preparation of the people who entered them. The Model African Union was, in part, my answer to that problem.
The opportunity was equally clear. The Model United Nations format had a long and credible track record as a vehicle for developing diplomatic literacy. But it was organised around a Western institution, structured by Western procedural norms, and measured by outcomes that reflected Western foreign policy priorities. For an institution dedicated to developing African leaders, this was not sufficient. Africa deserved its own version: organised around the African Union, tested against African challenges, and structured to develop an African theory of multilateral leadership.
The challenge was how to build something that would outlast any individual, produce measurable outcomes, and rise, over time, to the standard its potential demanded.
II.The Approach
My approach to ALAMAU reflected the same methodology that I use to develop every institution: start with the idea, design the architecture, and invest in the people who will carry it forward.
Start with intellectual seriousness.
From the outset, I designed ALAMAU as an educational experience, not an extracurricular event. For the inaugural conference, I recruited a team of 32 young leaders who spent 14 months in preparation. I took eight students to experience the Harvard Model United Nations conference in Boston and another six to the Georgetown Model United Nations conference in Qatar; many others took part in a local conference in Johannesburg amid several on-campus simulations. We conducted research, studied the African Union’s organs and procedures, visited the Pan-African Parliament, consulted experts, and produced 25-page study guides on complex African policy questions. Rather than presenting a simulation of diplomacy, what we created was a structured apprenticeship in the discipline required to practise it.
Build the institution before the event.
For implementation, we did not begin with a conference. I began by establishing the International Relations Council (IRC) as an inter-disciplinary research and programmes delivery team that became the organisational home of the whole ALAMAU enterprise. The IRC was both a training ground and a governance structure, ensuring that the knowledge, standards, and culture of the programme could be transferred from one cohort of student leaders to the next, year after year. I developed the curriculum and taught the classes on weekends while advocating for inclusion in the formal timetable; I developed the routines for simulations on weekday evenings; I set the standards for research and writing; and I set the rubric and expectations for auditions, induction and participation.
Recruit for potential, develop for performance.
The student leadership team — the Secretariat, committee chairs, directors of administration, finance, communications, and events — were not selected because they already knew what they were doing. They were selected because they showed the desire to push themselves and the capacity to learn quickly; previous Model United Nations or public speaking experience counted very little. Each year, I supervised 42 research projects and mentored a new cohort of young leaders, many of whom went on to pursue tertiary education in international relations, public policy, and diplomacy, which they claimed was directly because of what ALAMAU had shown them was possible.
“Rather than presenting a simulation of diplomacy, what we created was a structured apprenticeship in the discipline required to practise it.”
III.Implementation
Between 2012 and 2020, we created a continuously developing institution, with each annual conference both completing a cycle and raising the standard for the next.
Building the architecture
The first conference was the hardest, developed from December 2012 – April 2014. Along with my team of thirty-two young leaders, I built the programme from first principles — developing rules of procedure, designing committee structures, writing study guides, recruiting schools and delegates from across the continent. We launched with five committees simulating organs of the African Union, fourteen participating schools from nine countries, and the US Ambassador to South Africa as a keynote guest. The theme: Shared Challenges, Common Solutions was a signal that ALAMAU was not interested in cataloguing Africa’s problems but in modelling the habits of collaborative problem-solving that the continent’s institutions would need.
Growth and iteration
Over the following three years, I systematically expanded the programme’s reach while deepening its intellectual content. ALAMAU grew from five committees to ten and from 14 schools to 65, with participants from 58 nationalities. I developed the Faculty Advisor Programme, including the Teaching Africa Workshop, to bring educators alongside delegates, giving teachers a parallel curriculum track on how to integrate African Studies and diplomacy into their classrooms. This doubled ALAMAU’s impact as we were not only developing student delegates; we were developing the educators who would prepare the next generation of delegates. In 2017, I was invited by the African Union itself to consult at its headquarters in Addis Ababa on how to organise a Continental Model African Union for African youth — one of only three experts invited globally for this purpose. It was a signal that what had begun as an institutional initiative at a school in Johannesburg had grown into something with genuinely continental significance.
Scaling with integrity
By 2019, ALAMAU had fully established itself. What distinguished ALAMAU at this stage was not just its size, but its culture. The students who led it were operating at a level of strategic sophistication that would not have been out of place in a graduate programme in international affairs. Alumni were enrolling in international relations and political science degrees at leading universities in the United States and Europe, crediting ALAMAU as the experience that had oriented their intellectual direction. The programme was in its seventh year of consecutive annual delivery when the pandemic disrupted global gatherings. My tenure at ALA concluded in 2020, and my sabbatical stint with the secretariat of Catalyst 2030 and my subsequent appointment as Executive Director of UWC International represented, in part, the direct application of everything ALAMAU had taught me about building institutions at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and international affairs.
Across its operational life, the programme brought together 1,026 delegates, 182 faculty advisors, 65 schools, and 267 organizing staff, representing 58 nationalities and simulating 18 organs and affiliated organizations of the African Union across 38 substantive topics, generating over USD 2 million in revenue.
delegates from 58 nationalities across six conferences
IV.Key Results and Insights
The numbers
By the time I left ALA, ALAMAU had produced:
- 1,026
- delegates from 58 nationalities across six conferences
- 267
- organising staff trained in conference management, research, diplomacy, and institutional leadership
- 65
- participating schools from across Africa and internationally
- 182
- faculty advisors trained through the Teaching Africa Workshop
- 42
- research projects supervised annually across eight years
- 38
- substantive policy topics debated and resolved, spanning education, governance, energy, trade, conflict, maternal health, and climate resilience
- USD 2M+
- in programme revenue generated
- USD 150K+
- raised in scholarships for 120 researchers to attend 16 international conferences in the United States and Qatar
- 1 of 3
- global experts invited in 2017 to advise the African Union on the design of a Continental Model African Union
The immeasurable outcomes
The more important results were the ones that emerged over time. Alumni of ALAMAU’s student leadership team went on to study international relations, political science, and public policy at Macalester College, the University of Rochester, Oxford, and other leading institutions. Several have since entered careers in diplomacy, international development, and public governance; exactly the pipeline of continental leadership that ALAMAU was designed to build.
The deeper insight I took from nearly a decade of delivery was this: the highest-value development happened not in the delegate experience, but in the experience of those who build and run the programme. The young people who spent 14 months preparing for each conference were more deeply transformed by that preparation than by the five days of the conference itself. The discipline of building something genuinely excellent produced a kind of intellectual and professional formation that no taught curriculum could replicate.
This insight — that leadership development is most powerful when it is experiential, structured, and held to a real standard of excellence — is foundational to the approach I have carried forward into the institutions I have led since.
V.Challenges Faced
Building institutional memory across annual cohorts.
The most persistent structural challenge was the annual renewal of the student leadership team. Because ALA operated on a two-year pre-university cycle, the students who led ALAMAU in Year Two had, in most cases, arrived at the Academy only 16 months before the conference. Building institutional knowledge — rules of procedure, research standards, committee design, logistical protocols — across discontinuous cohorts required a permanent staff infrastructure and a deliberate knowledge transfer process that had to be rebuilt each year. The International Relations Council was my solution: a semi-permanent organisational layer that held institutional memory while the student leadership renewed. During my tenure, nearly 10 faculty members were involved in the IRC.
Maintaining intellectual depth at scale.
As ALAMAU grew from 14 schools to 65 and from five committees to 10, the risk of dilution was real. It would have been easy for ALAMAU to become a large, impressive, but intellectually shallow event. The intention was always to create a genuine laboratory for developing African diplomatic and systems leadership; holding that standard required consistent investment in study guide quality, committee chair preparation, and the Faculty Advisor Programme — all of which took immense resources and time that could easily have been redirected to growth.
Fundraising against a non-traditional value proposition.
The ALAMAU model — paying to send young leaders to a rigorous conference that develops their capacity to think about African governance — was a tough sell to the Academy’s leadership. In our first year, we had a loss of ZAR70,000 (a little over USD 5,000) – explaining this to the Dean of the Academy was one of my hardest days. From that point, I was determined that the programme would not only break-even but become a significant revenue generator for the Academy. We broke even by the second year and became profitable by the third year. Building the financial case for the programme required developing a theory of impact that linked the educational experience directly to the continent’s leadership pipeline.
Sustaining personal investment across eight years.
Leading ALAMAU was not a fraction of my responsibilities at ALA. It was a programme that I ran in addition to my formal roles — Communications & Marketing Associate, Head of Programme Recruitment and Partnerships, Director of Communications and Marketing. Supervising 42 research projects annually, mentoring a new cohort of student leaders, managing a growing conference, while simultaneously leading a department of 12 and driving institutional brand building, student recruitment and revenue growth — this was not sustainable without a deep conviction that the work mattered. That conviction, rooted in the same childhood political consciousness that had first driven me toward public affairs, never wavered.
Closing note
ALAMAU was never really my programme; it was the programme I built for Africa. When I left African Leadership Academy in 2020, ALAMAU did not end. The annual conference continues to this day, fortuitously led by a faculty member who was one of the second cohort of students who travelled with me to the Harvard Model United Nations conference in 2014, served as a Deputy Committee Chairperson at the inaugural ALAMAU conference and a Committee Chairperson at the second conference. The institution had taken root — in the people who had led it, in the schools that had participated, in the alumni who carried its culture into their universities and their careers. That is the measure of an institution worth building: not its performance while the founder is present, but its vitality after the founder has gone.
“…we will transmit this city not only not less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”