The African Youth Leadership Study is a transnational, multi-phase qualitative research project led by Dr. Krystal Strong. The project works to understand the convergence of educational interventions invested in developing African youth leadership in the contemporary moment.

Beginnings

Since 2006, Dr. Krystal Strong has conducted over four years of ethnographic research on university student politics and activism in southwestern Nigeria. Her fieldwork led to long-term relationships with a cohort of young leaders throughout Nigeria. Now an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, she is currently completing a book manuscript based on this research, titled Political Training Grounds: Schools and Youth Power in Nigeria After Democracy. Anecdotally, this work revealed many students and activists participate in leadership initiatives directed explicitly towards African youth.

Unable to identify existing research that examines contemporary leadership development programs for African youth, in the Spring of 2016 Dr. Strong invited then-master’s student Christiana Kallon to begin an exploratory project determining the scale and scope of African youth-focused leadership initiatives around the world. The pilot study revealed more than 150 programs, the vast majority of which were established in the past 10 years alone, and launched the present study.

Where are these leadership initiatives located and who is participating? How do they conceptualize leadership and development? What are these initiatives seeking to accomplish?

Mapping the Landscape

Guided by the pilot study, so far, the research team has identified over 180 unique leadership initiatives for African youth around the world. We continue to populate our database of initiatives and have mapped their locations and organizational features. We see a pattern of pedagogical and organizational approaches, discourses around leadership and development, and ideologies concerning social change across these initiatives.

Understanding youth experiences

Website

The intent of this website, in its current iteration, is: (1) to share with colleagues, collaborators, and participants how we understand our project and its process, (2) to build a collective knowledge of leadership initiatives targeting African youth, and (3) to provide and centralize access points for participation in the research.

This research and its web presence are inherently dynamic. As the research evolves and the site’s content, design, and discourse change, we will archive previous versions, which you can find here.

2019

Strong, K. and C. Kallon. (2019). “Tracking Leaders: A New Strategy for Educational Intervention in Africa?” Manuscript submitted for publication.

2018

Strong, K and C. Kallon. (2018, March). Leading Africa: Participant Experiences in “Youth Leadership for Development” Interventions. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, Mexico City.

2017

Strong, K. (2017, October). Tracking a Generation of Leaders: Education and the New Scramble for Africa. Colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, PA.

Strong, K. and C. Kallon. (2017, March). Tracking Leaders: The Institutionalization of Youth Leadership (for) Development in Africa. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, Atlanta.

Strong, K. (2017, February). Pedagogies of Politics: How Schools in Africa Are Developing a New Generation of Leaders. Invited Paper presented at the Global Education Colloquium at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. 

Institutional SUPPORT

This project has received support from the University of Pennsylvania. The principal investigator, Krystal Strong, Ph.D. is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. The project was institutionally reviewed and approved (IRB#829451).