Developing African Leaders - A Conversation with Hatim Eltayeb

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There's a lifetime of connection and service and collaboration that we're trying to encourage students to participate in, and that's also structured around problems, not around regions. And, and so that's kind of reinforcing the idea that it'll take Pan-African solutions to really maximize opportunities.

This week was an amazing inspiration to speak to Hatim El Tayeb, who is the Dean of the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg. Hatim leads the diploma program, enabling the rich community of colleagues and bringing the leadership learning program to life. Hatim is a lifelong educator with Pan-African and South-South tendencies. Sudanese by spirit and nationality, born in Kuwait, reared in Oman, raised in Cairo, and flourishing in Johannesburg, Hatim now works to translate the African Leadership Academy's mission into the daily work of building, learning, innovating, and leading the school community. He has represented ALA's work at conferences and convenings across the continent, as well as in Singapore, Japan, the US, and at the European Parliament in Brussels. Between 2012 and 2016, Hatim was back in his formative home of Cairo. With two partner educators, he founded Symposium, a school services and consulting company to serve hundreds of students at 15 leading independent schools in Cairo. He left his executive position in 2016 to return to the academy. Outside of ALA, Hatim serves on the board of Streetlight Schools, an organization working to make world-class education accessible to every South African child.

Hi, Hatim.

Tim, hi.

Well, thank you for taking the time. I'm really looking forward to the conversation because I've been watching you guys for quite a while. What I wanted to do maybe first off is think about the context that you're working in as we— and then perhaps narrow down into the specifics of the amazing work you're doing at African Leadership Academy. But starting with Africa as the context, and obviously Africa is a large collection of countries, and often many people bracket them as one thing, and it's clearly not. But at the same time, it's a hugely vibrant and diverse and exciting continent, right? Fastest growing, youngest population, et cetera, but also with some major challenges around global poverty et cetera. So in terms of your motivations and the institution's motivations, where do you see the challenges and opportunities in, in your context first?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, start sort of where you started by affirming that it's an immense continent and that it's immensely diverse in every sense of the word. But at the same time, I think the founding of ALA assumes and also relies on the idea that that immense expanse of people has some important shared experiences, that Africans are tied together by, you know, a past of resistance to colonialism and, and a particular place in the modern economic world order. And at the same time has a— probably, I mean, the path to prosperity is an interdependent one. It's unlikely that you'll be able to serve the billion or so people who call the continent home the way they deserve to be served, operating as islands of excellence. So what are the challenges? I think, you know, the basic challenge that ALA's mission is built around is a conviction that since independence, one of the key drivers for the sort of sustained failure has been a lack of effective and ethical leadership. And we can, we can analyze and disagree about, you know, how much of a difference individuals really make, but that's one of the things that AILA was built on. But I think the other realities of the continent that are important, that inform the work that we do, I hope— you alluded to one of them, which is a demographic reality that in spite of the very unequal distribution of resources on the continent, but also around the world, you know, if nothing changes, it's likely only to get worse because of how quickly populations are growing on the continent when they are not growing, or in fact are expected to decline over the next 100 years. There's a funny talk from one of our co-founders talking about the 6,000 days and kind of Fred's point is if you, if you look at the generally accepted population projections, you're going to have something like 4.5 billion Africans at the end of the century. The one that really drives the point home for me is that those projections put Nigeria's population at about 700 million, which is really remarkable number. And if you, if we don't find the ways to rearrange society, probably somewhat radically such that those people are able to access a dignified, fulfilling, enriching life, just like every human being deserves. Not only have we missed a really big opportunity just to add to the sum of human flourishing, we've also inherited a very significant liability. And for Africa, it's sustained instability, but I think even for the world, there's a chance to get things right and to kind of propel human civilization through this valley into the next kind of peak of opportunity. And yeah, I think that's the big context. That's the big lifetime of work. That I hope motivates people who, who work at ALA.

Amazing. Yeah, I mean, huge meta kind of picture, isn't it? But at the same time, that translates right down into the day-to-day work of working with these amazing young people to then build them up as, as you say, effective and ethical leaders to then do that work. Amazing, amazing. And so you mentioned Fred there, one of the founders with Chris Bradford and and a couple of others. Was there a specific moment where there was a recognition that this was necessary, or was it— I mean, obviously there's these important themes and threads that run through it, but was there a specific moment as the inception point, if you like, of ALA?

I think, you know, so I think as with any organization that has stumbled upon more success, you know, than maybe was anticipated, that it's hard to distinguish the fact from the mythology. You know, some of the facts we know are that the crux of the idea was that, you know, there was not amongst people with the means to afford a world-class education. So people on the continent who could afford to send their children anywhere in the world, there wasn't a destination on the continent that was serving them. And, you know, people came to this realization in different ways. Fred, because of his personal work, working in schools, Chris from working at schools in the UK, actually, and having African students in his classroom whose parents had sent them there. And when he organized the trip, that was a service trip to the continent, they were the students who didn't sign up. And so there was an idea that there's a gap, there's an opportunity in the market. So that's sort of the economic motivation.

Yeah.

I think there's also an important affinity that has been built into ALA's DNA since the beginning, the belief that an intervention at this age, particularly in a residential learning environment, is probably the tipping point where you can do the most to alter and accelerate someone's trajectory over the course of their lifetime.

Yeah.

They've got enough that you can engage them in really deep critical thinking, but they haven't formed some of the ossified beliefs and reservations about themselves and about other people and about the world. That make them close to opportunity down the line. And particularly if what we're looking for is in part changes of attitude, changes of purpose, I think the argument for doing it at this age range is a strong one.

Yeah, and just for those that don't know, the age range is 15 to 18, right?

So at application, so the day that you enroll at ALA, you have to be 16 years or older and not older than 19 years old. So it's because it's a 2-year program, it's a quite a wide age range, and that's partly because our catchment area is the entire continent. And so we've got very, very different sort of schooling systems. We also admit students regardless of their language background or their socioeconomic background. So prior opportunity is a very wide range.

Yeah, that was something I wanted to ask you about was just how you find these amazing young people. Do they— I mean, obviously it's a mix, I'm sure, but some of them are coming to you. But is there a sense that you're trying to reach out to really kind of exceptional young people across, as you say, this huge catchment area of the whole continent? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that's one of the pieces of work. We think of the model in 3 pieces: identify, develop, and connect. And a full third, at least, of what ALA is trying to achieve is the identification piece. But it's also just a very difficult one. You know, a thing that I've said to introduce ALA before in the past is leadership potential, if such a thing exists, and we choose to believe that it does, is probably evenly distributed across all people, just like height or other sort of, as much as it's baked into you, then it's probably appearing randomly. But definitely the opportunity to translate leadership potential into impact is not, and that's kind of what ALA is trying to do, is to say, let's go and find the most promising young people and then put them in a position where that potential is going to have the widest possible impact. When we are at our best, we work with adults, educators, people who run sports organizations or debate organizations or newspapers, who then get a chance to understand ALA's model and are working with high potential young people in their own context. And for them to recommend to us, whether it's an organization that works with, you know, does Math Olympiads or tech challenges or a service program, or, you know, works to provide additional resources to students in refugee schools. That's the network that we're trying to build. But also, I think there's a pull factor where we hope that the more we can put it out there, what it is that ALA is doing, the more young people looking for opportunities will find us.

Brilliant. Well, hopefully this conversation and the podcast can help with that pull factor, right? Definitely, that's one of my aims.

Applications are open. If anyone, if you come across anyone, and actually anyone in the world can apply. We've had a few people who are not Africans who are just curious about ALA apply. Okay, interesting.

Do you just, just for my curiosity, do you try to look evenly distributing across the continent or do you tend to get more Sub-Saharan Africa?

It's important for us to be very, as representative as we can. And there's, there's, we've enrolled students from 46 different African countries, which I think now means, no, it's actually 48, which means there are 6 or 7 countries that we haven't enrolled a student from. The way that we structure our recruitment team is that we have regional representatives who travel. Back when travel was a thing across regions, north, south, east, west, and central, to try and make sure that we have a wide representation of the entire continent. That generally we are regionally representative, I would say, although our Francophone West Africa numbers are not as good as I would like them to be, but there are definitely big gaps in terms of country-by-country representation.

Yeah. Interesting. And then if we can, as we dig down a little bit more specifically, you've already mentioned the effective and ethical leader, kind of mantle that you talk about. Clearly there are many different understandings of leadership and what it means, what good leadership is, et cetera. How did you come to that? As you've said, there's a context point for an ethical leader in Africa, of course, but how did that kind of definition come around? Was it a shared process of developing that together over time, or was it the founders initially?

I would say it is still evolving. And, and the way that our curriculum looks today is I would hope more sophisticated than it looked 5 years ago. And in some places, it's unrecognizable from the day that we opened. When it comes specifically— so just kind of some additional context, there are 3 ALA core courses that all students have to do. One of them is Entrepreneurial Leadership, which is sort of the flagship in the program, but I don't think is necessarily more important than anything else that we do. It all works in concert ultimately. Students also have to do 2-year sequence in African Studies and a 2-year sequence in Writing and Rhetoric. And then they also do their normal sort of school common subjects like physics, chemistry, biology, or history and math, which are aligned to Cambridge exams. So the EL courses, that Entrepreneurial Leadership course, started out initially as an entrepreneurship course and a leadership course. And a few years down the line, we thought, no, no, wait a minute, actually, these things can't be— we can't talk about them separately. They have a very meaningful relationship here where the entrepreneurialism is a skill set that is demonstrated or talked about most commonly when you're founding businesses. But, you know, I think schools around the world have made the realization that actually the things that are in here— communication, collaboration, ideation, design thinking— these are tools that you could use wherever you go. And if there's any useful conversation that includes the phrase Fourth Industrial Revolution, it's really talking about these interpersonal skills, right?

Yeah.

The leadership piece, I think, is, is where there is more the talking about different models and skills, but also where some of the ethics comes in. And in some places you can study it by case study, or there's other activities that are kind of built around having students reflect regularly on the ethical implications of the decisions that they make.

And I've got loads of questions from that, but one is, as they go through this Entrepreneurial Leadership course, clearly It's not just something you can learn about, right? You have to learn to do it. So how, how does that experiential element come in?

Absolutely. Yeah. It might be experiential to a fault. We may have overcorrected, but the way that it's currently structured right now, I don't, I'm not sure that the EL department would agree with me, but that's kind of where I'm landing nowadays. So the way that the, it's a 2-year program and the way that the EL sequence is structured in the first year, It's a series of team and individual design challenges that are increasingly more constrained, I guess. And that sort of sequence culminates in a pitch competition. Basically, we do something called Enterprise Fest or E-Fest that happens at the end of their second term. So two-thirds of the way through the third year, where students will take an idea that has— might have started out as their own and then got grouped with other ideas that were addressing a similar problem. And then, you know, they get a chance to kind of pitch for funding. Some of those businesses will then graduate into a simulated economy. So in the second year, every student is assigned to what is called a student enterprise. And in the SE program, we have enterprises that have been, that have been operating, some of them for 10, 12 years, that are doing things, merchandising. So the company called Footprints that does the t-shirts and the hats and the mugs, and they're learning about sort of inventory and learning about marketing, there will be grant-funded organizations that apply for grant funding each year so that they can, you know, I think there's a, there was an enterprise around for a couple of years recently that did sex education curriculum for schools in Southern Africa, and I think they managed to win a contract for UNICEF in Zimbabwe to create material for kids in schools. And then there's really technical ones like a student-run auditing firm that audits other student-run businesses and provides financial statements for them. And the idea is they're having over the course of their second year, a full business or enterprise experience. They've got board meetings, they have to prepare financial statements, they have to do all of those things, and they need to make a thing. And that thing may fail, it may succeed. And that's where they can apply the kind of theory that they're discussing about team building or about collaboration or about ideation, that sort of thing.

Fascinating. Yeah, brilliant. And the other question it sparked was around the styles of leadership, because I have this conversation a lot in lots of different contexts, and in the Middle East where I work a lot, and having done work in Africa as well, there is a kind of a more hierarchical approach to leadership in certain contexts. And then there is a less, a flatter, less hierarchical approach. And clearly it's context-specific and there's no generalizable one-size-fits-all is correct type approach. But I was wondering how much of that kind of work around agile leadership or transformational leadership, how much does that come into the conversation?

Yeah. So, so there is definitely at a theoretical level, exposure to different styles of leadership as just a good entry point for having a sophisticated conversation about what leadership is. There isn't a correct style that we advance, and there isn't actually even an official ALA definition of leadership. And I think the idea is to, on the one hand, and this is my personal take on it, you want to dampen both the pressure and the ego that comes with the idea of being a graduate of something called leadership academy. That you now have this burden to save the continent. And at the same time, you've got this sort of martyr or messiah complex that I think we have to work hard to dismantle before they leave, because the world will probably give them some opposite feedback. So, so not having a one-size-fits-all definition is probably useful in that sense. And the other thing is, you know, I want to think that there are humble, simple ways to do important and urgent work. That isn't going to be captured in the conversation about leadership typically, but is actually the sort of lifetime that we need some of these people to choose, if that makes sense.

Brilliant.

No, I mean, that makes perfect sense to me because I think that's— I mean, you're totally right. Just humility and that self-awareness and all these attributes that, yes, you could put them in a bucket called leadership, but you could also just put them in a bucket called human, right? And that's such an interesting kind of self-reflection for you as an institution that your graduates will come up against certain, as you say, opposite feedback or difficulties and actually challenges coming out of such an incredible experience. But the world may not know entirely how to interact with them all. Absolutely.

Or even the opposite, Tim. You know, I think our most recent student graduate speaker, warned his classmates against the fact that because they've had these opportunities, they're going to have other opportunities given to them that they aren't going to have to work as hard for. And it's easy to kind of get distracted by that and end up finding yourself in an ivory tower and feeling like you deserve it without actually having put the work in for—

Yeah.

In fact, you say that you—

Well, that's, that's quite an insight right there. Yeah. No, that's brilliant. Good on him or her, whoever that was. Yeah. Amazing. And then, so one of the things that as I said, I was really interested to talk about some of this identity piece. And you mentioned that the African studies and the rhetoric and writing stuff, which I'm assuming has some, you know, some African literature kind of dimension to it deeply. So where do you see that specific kind of Pan-African identity piece coming into the learning experience?

In a few different ways. So you know, probably the most visible way is in the curriculum. And so there's, there's this 2-year sequence in African Studies and in Writing and Rhetoric, which actually begins as an interdisciplinary course. So they, it's co-taught and co-planned between those 2 departments in the very first term, when they do a shared sequence of units, which we call Omang, which is, if I'm not wrong, it's a Tswana word that means identity. And, and actually the first sort of essential question that we use to introduce a bunch of core skills, but also to set the tone for their journey at ALA is, what does it mean to be African? And obviously there's not, there's not a good answer. That's why it's a good question. And wrestling with that is an invitation for students to kind of start grappling with who they are and where they come from, but also an invitation to participate in authoring the African identity that they think Africans deserve. And that's something, a question that I hope they'll return to over the course of their lifetime. But that ALA wants to be an inclusive definition, you know, and obviously the students' prior experience of being African is very different, particularly for North African students, for instance, who by choosing to come to a school like ALA are not necessarily following the mainstream back home. So that's the very, very obvious visible way. That's the very deliberate. Another deliberate and less obvious way is just the way we think about some of the structures and rituals on campus. So we try and, structure things like advisory families or classrooms or residential halls in a way that they're representative in a Pan-African way.

Yeah.

And then the last thing, and, you know, I'm not sure how much time we'll have to talk about the work that we do with students after they graduate from ALA, but, you know, there's a lifetime of connection and service and collaboration that we're trying to encourage students to participate in. And that's also structured around problems, not around regions. And, and so that's kind of reinforcing the idea that it'll take Pan-African solutions to really maximize Amazing.

That is absolutely something I would love to talk to you about because I, you know, clearly Fred is doing kind of larger work with the African Leadership Group and with the African Leadership University and then other dimensions to that kind of portfolio of organizations, but they seem to be very clearly kind of glued together by this really strong vision, which you share with at the Leadership Academy. So one of the questions was how much interaction and kind of dialogue is there between those organizations? And I'm absolutely interested in, yes, then what do the alumni, your graduates from the Academy, you know, is there a strong link to the university? Was that a conscious and intentional thing? Or, you know, and what's the broader picture of what happens then?

Yeah. So the first thing to say is the strongest connection between these different entities is a set of shared principles and largely overlapping missions, right? A sense that education is an important tool.

Yeah.

That relationships are also an important tool and that networks of people responsibly will have a big impact on the problems that need to be solved. There's no sort of structural legal connection. We don't have a shared board or shared leadership necessarily, but there's a lot of cross cross-pollination in terms of human resources. So there are definitely people from ALA who've gone on to work at some of these different institutions and vice versa, because they— because we have common DNA and obviously a shared founder. There's also, you know, what we want to do more of is shared learning, and, and already, you know, baked into ALU, there's a lot of the— there's some of ALA's thinking around entrepreneurial leadership that's gone into informing the first year, which is their leadership core that all students do before they go on to their degree programs. In terms of graduates, yeah, there are definitely— I would imagine ALA is one of the bigger sending schools to the, to the university, in part because I think when they were founding a university, it's good to have students who are in the founding classes that have a strong sense of the culture that you're hoping to create at a different level of education. And for some of our students, it's attractive because of its focus on entrepreneurship and on African concerns, but there's still a lot more that could happen.

Yeah. And is it physically located in Johannesburg as well?

No. So ALA, the academy, is the only institution in Johannesburg. The university first campus was in Mauritius and now has a second campus in Rwanda. And then the— so there's a sort of post-secondary and post-university short courses program called ALX, which has had offices in Nairobi, Somewhere in West Africa as well.

Yeah, brilliant. And one of the other things that connects to that I've picked up on, it's not so explicit maybe, but the networking element and you, you know, you used it there, but it seemed like that idea of connecting people, not, you know, not just developing, but also connecting networks of leaders and, you know, just, you know, great people doing great work seemed to be one of the things that was in the DNA of what you, what you do.

Absolutely. I mean, you know, I shared a little bit at the beginning that the core model of the institution is this identify, develop, and connect.

Yeah.

And for us, that's always meant, you know, graduating from a well-resourced secondary school, hopefully attending and graduating from a well-resourced university is great. At that point, you're probably 21, 22 years old, maybe a little bit older, and haven't been at home for at least 6 years, maybe longer. You don't have the professional networks that your former schoolmates have because they've been at home this whole time doing internships relationships at home or getting their first jobs. And so in order to ensure that our graduates are building meaningful relationships on the continent, we spend a lot of effort creating ways to connect them to work opportunities. And then a few years ago, we crossed the tipping point where the majority of our graduates were now in the world of work, and that's going to be true for the rest of ALA's existence, hopefully. And so we thought about the way we do alumni services and decided to organize that around sectors of impact rather than region or year of graduation. We're now thinking about how do you do cross-generational meetings where someone who's interested in education can meet someone 20 years down the line from a different part of the continent, and they can be thinking about those things together.

Amazing. Yeah, yeah, kind of intentionally recreating the, the classic old boys network of the, you know, right?

Yeah, colonial boys, and they're getting together to think about, uh, public benefit, hopefully, hopefully.

I mean, exactly. Yeah, amazing. Oh, that's so good. And then just lastly, you've obviously had an Well, people may not know, but I've seen you've got Bilhar Ndurangu has just come in as the new CEO taking over from Chris Bradford, who was obviously one of the co-founders. That's quite a big moment in a startup to established organization's lifespan, right? In terms of them passing it on to someone who wasn't one of the founders. Where are you now, would you say that in terms of strategic development, where, you know, what are the directions of things that Bilha would take forward? You know, what's next for ALA?

Yeah, well, we're in the last couple of years of our current strategic plan, ALA 2023, and it's the perfect time to do a post-founder transition because Bilha has the chance to relearn the organization, build the relationships, understand where we are succeeding and where we're falling short, and then lead the process of writing our next strategic plan over the the following 18 months. I think, you know, we're all excited for A, because she just has a remarkable track record on the continent of doing exactly the kind of work that many of our graduates will take on. And actually, you know, B, she represents just having kind of started on the path 10 years earlier than, but has gone, followed a path that we expect many of our graduates to follow, you know, having a terrific high school experience, and then having opportunities to study at a world-class institution, and then deciding consciously that actually the problems that I want to solve are back home. Home and doing it, you know, and kind of putting your money where your mouth is. So there's a symbolic and almost philosophical affinity that we all have for what she's doing.

Amazing.

I think, you know, when I've heard her talk and the way that she's thinking about it is, I think she's going to challenge us to be more clear about the impact we are having on students and what we think drives that impact, not for the purpose not solely of verification or documentation, but of finding realistic, sustainable ways to widen the scope of it. We've thought about scale in lots of different ways at ALA and have made conscious decisions to stay small. And I think she wants to think about, well, what's, what are the assets and what's the collateral that you can make more widely accessible so that, yes, if there's something powerful that's happening on this campus, how do we make that possible for more students?

Yeah, I can imagine it's tempting because as you said, the numbers are big, right? There's a lot of zeros in those numbers at the beginning about Africa, right? So I can imagine the temptation to take the, you know, the beautiful things that you're doing and expand them to more, you know, increase, widen access to more people, but you don't want to do that and compromise the integrity of what it is you're doing, right?

Right.

Yeah.

No, fascinating stuff. Well, yeah. Thank you. I think amazing. I mean, it's Clearly you guys are doing such inspirational work and, you know, it's a big word, but I think it's true. And thank you for describing it. And I just hope in some small way we can, the podcast can help attract some more amazing applicants from across Africa and, but also, you know, just inspire other people in other contexts to do more of this important work for leadership.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity, Tim Logan. I enjoyed the questions and I like the conversation.

I could deal. Thank you, man.

Amazing.

This is great. All the best.

Lovely thing in the middle of my day. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon.

You too. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.