African Leadership Academy (ALA): Fostering Moral and Intellectual Character Development in Africa

Africa’s schools are not preparing the youth of the world’s youngest continent to solve the development challenges they face. Test scores are poor, dropout rates are high, and little attention is given to virtue development. Schools prize the facts students can recite, rather than the real-world problems they can solve. But over the past twelve years, African Leadership Academy (ALA) has demonstrated the impact of a curriculum oriented around character and leadership on a pan-African student body from wide-ranging socioeconomic backgrounds. ALA seeks to develop exceptional intellectual and moral character in each student. A central outcome is autodidactic capability: a student’s ability to direct and manage their own learning to surmount ambiguous challenges and achieve their goals. Thus, young Africans leave the ALA campus with the skills, knowledge, and mindsets necessary to devise appropriate solutions to some of the continent’s biggest challenges. We seek a planning grant from the John Templeton Foundation for a project that will improve how we foster and demonstrate autodidactic growth in young Africans and build a movement around character development in schools across the continent. We anticipate that this work will evolve into a multi-year research project that will mobilize a pan-African community of practice to explore questions of intellectual and moral character development. We expect to share our conclusions with a broad network of students, parents, teachers, school leaders, and policy makers across Africa. With JTF support, we will transform the educational landscape in Africa, enabling tens of thousands of young people to live lives of meaning and purpose and lay the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous Africa. With our extensive network, programmatic expertise, and demonstrated educational excellence, we are well-positioned to complete this project and advance our shared interests in this important field.