Beginnings

From ____ to _____ Dr. Krystal Strong spent three years in Nigeria conducting ethnographic research on University student politics and activism. Her fieldwork led to long-term relationships with a number of young leaders throughout Nigeria. As an Assistant Professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, she continues this work as she revises her dissertation into a manuscript titled Political Training Grounds: Students and the Future of Post-Military Nigeria. Anecdotally, this work revealed many students and activists participate in leadership programs and initiatives directed explicitly towards African youth. Unable to identify existing research that examines contemporary leadership development programs geared towards African youth, Dr. Strong invited then Master’s student Christiana Kallon to begin an exploratory exploratory project determining the scale and scope of African youth-focused leadership initiatives. The exploratory study revealed more than 150 programs, the vast majority of which were established in the past 10 years alone.

New Questions

What are these programs seeking to accomplish? Where are they located? Who is participating? Who do they support? How are these programs established? With firmer selection criteria, the research team coded a database of over 180 unique initiatives to answer theses questions. We continue to populate this database, and have mapped these findings. We see a pattern of pedagogical approaches leadership education and a convergence of educational interventions in Africa targeting social transformation. Further questions about youth’s experiences in these programs bring this work to a multi-phase qualitative research project, titled Developing A New Generation of Leaders: Participant Experiences in Youth Leadership Programs in Africa. We are distributing a survey for participants and alumni of leadership initiatives. We are simultaneously conducting interviews with youth. We anticipate this phase to continue through _________.

Website

The intent of this website, in its current iteration, is (1) to share with youth and colleagues how we understand our project and its process, (2) build a collective knowledge of leadership initiatives for African youth, (3) provide and centralize access points for participation in the research. It is our hope the web presence of this project expands forms a critical use for young people. Like many factors affecting people’s choices to engage with research, our understanding of the project and its questions are temporal. Therefore, this site is not static. It is not our intent to mislead participation with these changes. Rather, this work is inherently dynamic. As the site’s content, design, and discourse change correspondingly, we will archive previous versions, which you can find here.

Institutional Legitimacy and Funding

This research will open space in literature for a conversation on the resurgent role of educational development in the production of a new political leadership class in Africa. This project is funded by the University of Pennsylvania. Krystal Strong, Ph.D. is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. The project has institutionally reviewed and approved (IRB#829451, Expiration Date: 03 May 2019).