Yesterday morning, after last night’s trying seven hour drive, we met with Fred, the founder of the African Leadership Academy, whose inaugural class will be beginning this September. His own personal life story was inspiring in itself, but the meeting also revealed certain aspects of strong leadership and the non-profit sector. The African Leadership Academy is a school that is taking one hundred African students and six others that have been deemed the strongest in leadership, entrepreneurship, and the ability to create change in Africa. They will be put through a curriculum in which every subject is focused around how to impact Africa. Fred was born in Ghana but moved around from country to country with his mother. It ends up that he became the headmaster of an impromptu school for poor children at the age of 18. The school is now considered one of the best models in Africa. He didn’t stop with the school, however. He attended a college in Minnesota and then Stanford for his MBA. When, while writing a college paper, he identified the root issue in Africa, lack of strong leadership, he decided to create an African Leadership Academy.

His story was a major motivator for me—I’m now itching to accomplish something, no joke—but I took away some valuable and useful information from that meeting as well.

1. Relationships and social connections are not only useful, they are crucial. Major funding for non-profits usually comes through connections made, like friends, family, and acquaintances. Multiply that by the people they know, and you have a network. (Six degrees of separation, anyone?) Not only does this apply to donations for non-profits, but to everything in life, like job opportunities. It’s all about the people you know. And besides, as he said, “Having relationships is one of the most exciting things about being human.”

2. “You don’t go for something big unless you believe it’s going to work,” Fred told us. I think that’s very helpful to consider, especially for me. If I’m going to do something difficult, I will have to be willing to take (calculated) risks, and go the entire way because I have faith that it will pull through. It’s not a question of blind faith, but coming to terms with the situation, looking at it objectively, and seeing whether it will work. If it will, then that is the time to go for it.

3. Fix the roots, not just the symptoms. This applies to everything from economics to medicine. While treating the symptoms will provide temporary relief, they’ll just keep popping up until the root cause is addressed. In terms of Africa, the symptoms are high unemployment, poverty, HIv/AIDS levels, malaria levels, violence, and so forth. Fred chalked up the root cause to be lack of leadership, and his mission is to address that issue.

4. Make a problem a challenge, not something impossible to solve. Fred asked us to guess the rate of HIV positive people in Africa. I won’t finish this story quite yet, since this will be a chance for readers to guess. (The rest of the story will be finished at the end of the entry.)* But I learned from this that the trick is to show people that this is actually a manageable problem rather than a monolith, and then things will actually get done.

5. “Do what you do best, but partner with people who know what they do,” said Jenny. To me, this means teamwork. Learn to be a team, because a team should be able to support each other in the fields in which the others are weak.

6. “Think about impact 50 years down the line.” – Fred. This is the most daunting one for me. What could I do that will have a positive impact down the line? I haven’t the slightest idea yet, but I do know that I should keep it in mind when thinking about life.

*Continuing the story, our group guessed around 10%-20%. I settled on a 13%,, though I had a nagging feeling that we were shooting high. Surely enough, we were. Embarrassingly, it ended up to be 2.5%, half the lowest guess, which was Jenny’s 1 out of 20. I guess it goes to show our misconceptions of Africa are out of hand.

(See Ryan's Africa Trip Blog for more entries.)