Developing leaders who will design and implement food security strategies and investment plans that reduce hunger and poverty over the long term

Africa Leadership Training and Capacity Building Programme (Africa LEAD)

Country: Sub-Saharan Africa (13 countries)
Contract Period: October 2010 – September 2012
Client: U.S. Agency for International Development

The U.S. Government’s Feed the Future (FTF) initiative marks a radical departure from USAID’s customary level of engagement with host-country governments. FTF calls not simply for host-country partnership - long a tenet of most projects - but for genuine host-country leadership.

AFRICA LEAD operates in three regions - with headquarters in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa - and in at least 13 sub-Saharan countries. Working across a range of public and private institutions, it builds the capacity of leaders to devise and manage Country Investment Plans that embrace strong leadership, solid management, and keen strategic planning.

This work is done within the framework of the New Economic Partnership for African Development’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, which requires countries to allocate 10 percent of their budgets to agriculture in order to raise its productivity.

The project is conducting four main tasks:

■ Delivering training modules that give a cadre of Africans the skills and knowledge necessary to scale up activities in agriculture and food security. Courses motivate participants to take the lead in their own institutions, countries, and regions.

■ Providing logistical support for seminars as well as follow-up with attendees.

■ Assessing needs by understanding the roles people and institutions play in meeting FTF goals, and tying those roles to the capacity-building effort; determining which institutions to assess, developing a cost-effective assessment schedule, and tracking institutions’ progress; and communicating capacity-building needs to the institutions that implement the training.

■ Creating an interactive, easily updated training database that serves as a matchmaking tool that leads institutions to develop appropriate training programmes, while ensuring that courses in the database are high quality and applicable to the needs of African leaders.

AFRICA LEAD is measured in part by the quantity and quality of its training, institutional strengthening, and leadership development, but another of its achievements is equally profound: a dramatic change in the perception of the United States on the part of host country governments, in which the United States is seen as a true partner and supporter of a sound development agenda that responds to national priorities and is directed by national leaders.