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.)

The long 15 hour plane ride was well worth the wait. Even though the difference when going out of the airport in Johannesburg, once you head away from the city, Boston suburbs and Johannesburg suburbs are extremely different. Instead of larger houses with $50,000 cars, there are houses made out of bricks and cinder blocks with goats and chickens.

On the first couple days, we attended a meeting at the Umsubomvu Youth Fund Center. We were able to get a full overview of the entire organization and everything they do for young adults. After this, we visited someone who was a member of the UYFC and who received a loan to start a business. This was a young woman in her twenties who was starting up a spa, and she and her mom were so excited about starting up this business. This was interesting to see because it showed how successful Microfinance can be.

The next place we went was the Phinda Game Reserve for our safari. The drive from Jo’berg to the reserve was eight hours long and it took even longer because we got stuck behind a bus on the back roads at the end of the drive before we got to the reserve. The camp site we stayed at was amazing and the game drives we went on were incredible because we were able to get so close to the animals that we saw. After the first day I already wanted to be a ranger so I could do that every day and get paid doing it.

When we were at the game reserve we went to the nearby town to see the schools and the new institutions they installed for computer and health classes. Going to the school was a lot of fun because the kids loved seeing us and swarmed around us to get in a picture. After the safari trip we headed back to Jo’berg for a night before heading off to Zambia.

We stayed in Lusaka for the first couple days in Zambia. We did a lot in Lusaka and never even got a chance to relax during the day because of everyone we were meeting and everything we were going to. Everyone we met was part of some program helping with Microfinance, malaria prevention, or HIV/AIDs prevention. One of the places we went to was called grassroot soccer and it used soccer to educate people about HIV/AIDs. We were able to play a couple games that they use in the program that were fun and after that were even able to play a soccer match with a bunch of Zambians who were part of the program. This was incredible because it was a once in a lifetime experience.

After Lusaka we took a six hour drive to Livingstone. In Livingstone we went to visit a village, barder with villagers for different trinkets and able to see Victoria Falls. Victoria Falls was amazing and we got soaked because the falls spray up so much mist after hitting the bottom of the 120m long waterfall. The only part I was disappointed about was that I wasn’t able to go on the tallest bungee jump spot in the world, even though I don’t know if I would be able to do it once I was actually standing on the edge.

Nick