Growing insecurity and failing governance in Africa have resonated debates on the nexus between governance and security as a unitary concept or a complementary reality. Socio-political landscapes of across regions have witnessed and continues to witness threats that either fueled conflicts or created insecurity. Indeed, without security, governance is limited and without good governance, security is at risk. Thus, central to the nexus of governance and security resulting from proactive or reactive policy decisions is leadership. Drawing from the shared, or sometimes exclusive challenges that vary from one country to another, the task of political reengineering therefore requires constructive leadership to preempt or avert potential internal threats. Within the context of globalization and the integrative regional mechanisms including ECOWAS, IGAD and SADC, internationalization of insecurity, insurgencies, terrorism and conflicts have been influenced by exclusive home grown intractable internal tensions and conflicts. The consequences of the seemingly unresolved internal challenges and its internationalization have continued to generate mounting local and international concerns. The experiences of past leaders in Africa beyond back-channel advice or election monitoring have been noticeably underutilized. Their visibility in discussing governance challenges and influencing existing policy decisions while challenging budding leaders cannot be overemphasized to improve knowledge and practice. We believe in unpacking the minds of leaders on the pros and cons of decisionmaking to enrich an informed approach to the present and future of leadership and statecraft on the continent. The Experiential Leadership in Africa taps into the vast experiences and knowledge of former leaders who have weathered both successes and failures and makes them available to current and budding leaders as well as other critical stakeholders. It provides a consistent platform for the blend of experiential leadership perspective and academic discourse.
The Experiential Leadership Series platform hosts a former or current President or Head of State for a global live interactive session to unpack challenges associated with governance and decision making while in office with actionable recommendations. To further enrich the discourse, academic perspective is provided by leading global academics for seminal policy products. Beyond hosting the Series on a notable international platform, the initiative is aimed at enriching faculties of leading global Universities with research focus on Africa to advance knowledge and practice as well as reinforce African solutions to African problems. Expected participants including security officials, policymakers, policy implementers, advisers, civil society practitioners, private sector, budding leaders, researchers and students among others are afforded first-hand information from the principal actor through structured questions. The products of the Series are to be presented to key stakeholders to markedly contribute to knowledge and practice around statecraft, leadership, human security, governance, socio-economic development, political ideology, international relations, and conflict transformation.
The Experiential-Future-Connect is a direct engagement with the different strata of leadership and governance to build capacity and provoke reforms particularly at the local levels. Leveraging on the experiences of former leaders as well, this strategy focuses on grooming budding political and business leaders including the youths for political and other leadership responsibilities from a pragmatic lens. This direct engagement will enrich conversations, knowledge and deliberate practice of deepening decentralization and devolution of powers as well as the strengthening of local capacity for governance.
- To contribute to better understanding of the complexities of decision-making from
Experiential lens.
- To enhance capacity of organizations and governments for improved productivity around leadership, security, policy, conflict, and elections management.
- To embed a sustainable knowledge sharing platform for proactive and pragmatic approaches to managing gaps in statecraft from accountable experiential discourse.
- To reinforce Experiential-Future-Connect for youth and civil society leadership development.
- To deepen research and policy engagement for better policy formulation and implementation.
- To ensure global participation of the Series to broadly enrich contributions as well as widely publicize and disseminate the policy outputs to advance knowledge and practice.