Explore AL for Education:

The ALforEducation Fellowship

The Accelerator invests deeply in promising leaders building extraordinary organizations serving wide-ranging communities across Africa. We deliver a three-year fellowship program designed to foster the leadership, management, and education know-how required to build a transformational organization.

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A Leadership Development Program for Edupreneurs

A movement is forming across Africa, as young leaders build organizations to tackle one of the greatest challenges of our time: expanding access to education and improving the quality of schooling on the world’s youngest continent. In 2019, African Leadership Academy launched the ALforEducation Accelerator to nurture these young leaders and foster excellence within their organizations. Our pilot program is an intensive leadership development program for entrepreneurs who have started high-potential schools across Africa.
Our unit of long-term change is the leader, rather than the school they are building today. We select leaders who have successfully built schools, as a testament to the kind of commitment and entrepreneurial leadership that is required for long-term success, and we employ the school entity as a vehicle for the leader’s learning and leadership development – and a springboard to a career filled with challenges of increasing scale.

Program Overview

Over three years, the ALforEducation Accelerator works closely with the edupreneurs to help them grow as education leaders, and by extension, help grow their education enterprises. More specifically, the Accelerator commits to providing the following:

  • Support in assessing your school’s baseline performance;
  • Quarterly in-person leadership development sessions;
  • Small financial grants tied to your development and delivery;
  • Access to expert shared services in financial management and in monitoring & evaluation;
  • Professional development for your teachers through our Master Teacher Program; and
  • Connections to expert advisers, mentors and sources of capital.

In exchange, cohort members commit to the following:

  • Be engaged members of the cohort through regular communication with their fellow members and ALforEducation staff.
  • Attend quarterly leadership development sessions designed for their growth and the growth of their organizations.
  • Collaborate with ALforEducation staff in conducting baseline and follow-up assessments of their organizations.
  • Provide ALforEducation staff with data that can help build an understanding of the school’s impact and development over time.

Join Our Next Cohort

We are recruiting our next cohort of African education leaders. More specifically, we’re looking for people who meet the following criteria:

  • Currently running schools or organisations that have some proven track record of impact
  • Working full time on their venture
  • Have a strong commitment to the betterment of education on the continent
  • Have a vision for growing their schools both in reach and in quality

Recruitment for Accelerator cohort goes through our annual Edupreneur Growth Lab. If the above resonates with you and you’d like to be considered, please apply for the Growth Lab. Applications for this 6 week short-course will be announced soon.

Meet the Team

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Ngor Majak Anyieth

Ngor Majak Anyieth is the founder and president of Education Bridge Inc. Before starting Education Bridge, Majak helped run youth entrepreneurship seminars through Build South Sudan. His work with Build South Sudan showed him the power of youth and convinced him that when we change youth’s mindset, we transform our communities. Majak is a graduate of the African Leadership Academy and the University of Notre Dame.

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Deborah Kalala

Deborah is an ALA alumna from the class of 2014. In 2017, she started Manasse school in Mont-Amba, the biggest and poorest district in Kinshasa, to offer high quality affordable education to those who could not afford it. In only 2 years, Deborah was able to grow enrollment to over 200 students. In the next few years, she hopes to expand the school to secondary level to continue to serve current students throughout their academic journey.

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Ntakamaze Nziyonvira

Ntakamaze is originally from DRC. He was one of the founders of CIYOTA, an organization that started by addressing the need of hunger among orphan children in the camp, to expand to a wide range of services today including a community-based primary school. Ntakamaze graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Rochester courtesy of Master Card Foundation Scholars Program.