US President Barack Obama
The University of South Africa (Unisa) will head the education alliance tasked with running the South African leadership centre to be established as part of US President Barack Obama’s Young African Leadership Initiative (Yali).The university will be required to provide quality expertise in governance and leadership training, as well as entrepreneurship support.
Unisa principal and vice-chancellor Professor Mandla Makhanya commented in a statement on Tuesday that this appointment reaffirmed the stature and leadership excellence of the university and the significant role it would play in reshaping Africa’s economy, as well as the continent’s social and political landscapes.
“As one of the leading institutions of higher learning on the continent, we will play our part in shaping future African leaders. The task that we have been appointed to do resonates fully with our mission to be the African university in the service of humanity,” he added.
Unisa will partner with the United States Agency for International Development, the Innovation Hub and the University of Pretoria in heading the centre.
The South African leadership centre forms part of an expansion of the Yali, with similar centres to be established Ghana, Senegal and Kenya.
The programme’s expansion, as announced by Obama in July, also entails the renaming of the Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders to the Nelson Mandela Fellowship for Young African Leaders, with a commitment to double its participants to 1 000 by 2016.
The Yali will also, in future, aim to provide hundreds of new entrepreneurship grants and mobile incubators, with a Global Entrepreneurship Summit to be held in Morocco in 2015.