What We seek to achieve

The African continent is very rich and diverse. There are abundant human and natural resources in the continent. But the continent has the worst development indices in the world: maternal mortality, infant mortality, literacy rate, HIV/AIDs prevalence, poverty rate, life expectancy etc.

More than half of the population of African people are living in abject poverty. Most countries in sub-Saharan Africa are unlikely to achieve the modest Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by world leaders at the UN Millennium Declaration in 2000. Many African countries continue to suffer food shortages. Some countries are in conflict. We have experienced democratic reversals in some countries with the military coming to power in Guinea Bissau.

All of these make the development of Africa a huge challenge. The continents efforts to grapple with the developmental challenges have been complicated by its colonial history, globalisation, leadership failures and adoption of development approaches that have been proved to be inadequate. The importance of leadership for the success of organizations and nations cannot be overemphasized. Some scholars have pointed out that everything rises and falls on leadership.

Despite this recognition, there is scarcity of leaders all over the world. There is a saying that the world is filled with followers, supervisors and managers but very few leaders. There are four kinds of people in the world: those who watch things happen; those who let things happen; those who ask what happened and those who make things happen. Leaders are those who make things happen.

A visionless, insecure and incompetent leadership is a killer of organization and nations. Similarly, strategy is very crucial to the development and performance of any organisation or nation. Strategy occupies a central position in the focus and proper functioning of any organization or nation.

This is because it is a plan that integrates an organizations or nations major goals, policies and action into a cohesive whole. A well formulated strategy should therefore help to marshal and allocate an organisations or nations resources into a unique and viable posture based on its relative internal competencies and shortcomings, anticipated changes in the environment, and contingent moves by others. Strategies help to create a sense of politics, purpose and priorities.

A dynamic and visionary leadership combined with appropriate strategy process will produce a correct development approach that will lead to the prosperity and development of Africa.

The African Centre for Leadership Strategy and Development is poised to contributing to the transformation of Africa through building dynamic and visionary leadership and proposing appropriate strategies and development approaches.

The major focus of work will run from Nigeria partnering with organisations across Africa.

Source: African Centre for Leadership Strategy and Development