African Leadership Academy (ALA) aims to create a pipeline of leaders for Africa through entrepreneurial leadership. ALA students undergo a two-year educational program that trains them to create workable models to capture opportunities and develop solutions to problems in their communities. The Academy seeks to support ALA students who would like to share these learnings with youth in their home countries through entrepreneurial leadership camps across Africa. BUILD-in-a-Box (BIAB) is a portable toolkit that provides content and teaching materials that allow a team of youth facilitators to run a professional two-day entrepreneurial leadership camp aimed at 15-22-year-olds.
The programme, developed and delivered by ALA in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation and Blackstone Charitable Foundation was borne out of the recognition of one of the greatest challenges facing Africa today: the urgent need to address youth unemployment across the continent. The camps aim to empower students to embrace an innovative approach to problems and opportunities so that they can take initiative and make decisions that create positive changes in their communities and their personal lives. The curriculum is based on BUILD, a unique framework for teaching youth entrepreneurship as a way of fighting unemployment and engaging youth to lead solutions to local problems.
This document outlines our approach to peer-led learning camps for entrepreneurial leadership aimed at youth across the continent. We detail the BIAB unique model for creating change and the camp structure for delivering that model to youth. We hope that the model we detail, as well as our experiences and outcomes from running these camps across 23 African countries in 2015, will provide lessons for youth development organisations and educational institutions who are seeking to train youth in a peer-to-peer model.
This report provides and overview of the mission and objectives of BUILD-in-a-Box, the structure and delivery model of the camps, and our specific outcomes and lessons from the 2015 July /August camp season in which we ran 27 camps across 23 different African countries. We specifically highlight the curriculum adopted, programme activities, programme partners, and programme participants and facilitators.
Read the report and reach out to the editor to find out more about the programme, explore the BIAB model and explore some collaboration opportunities.
