The thrill of social entrepreneurship is exactly the same as that of the commercial kind, says Fred Swaniker, the chief executive of the African Leadership Academy (ALA). He should know.
The ALA, a top-quality school in Johannesburg aimed at nurturing high-potential young leaders from Africa, is his first non-profit venture, but the third overall if you add the two commercial enterprises he helped start up in his peripatetic career. It’s never about the money anyway, says Swaniker.
Entrepreneurs, whether they are busy with non-profit or commercial ventures, get a kick out of solving problems and making a difference. It’s about power, a cynic might say.
This is certainly true for Swaniker and his co-founder and chief operating officer, Chris Bradford, who are finalists for this year’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year award, but only in the most non-cynical way possible.
Although the ALA is still a small school, with 183 students from 33 African countries this year, the dream behind it is as big as any that had ever fired up a business empire. They want to change fundamentally the way power is wielded in Africa by providing a top-quality education to future African leaders and instilling in them a sense of ethics, accountability and entrepreneurship.
Every year the ALA recruits about 100 leaders in the making. Most are school leavers, but any high-potential youth between the ages of 16 and 19 who shows remarkable leadership or innovative ability is eligible for enrolment, irrespective of country, language, gender, culture, ability to pay school fees, or even academic background in exceptional cases.
They study for two years at the ALA. The core of the curriculum is the British A-levels, but it is augmented by an intensive leadership, entrepreneurship and African studies programme that lasts two years and ends in a “culminating project” — an outreach plan, conceptualised and implemented by each student, that must have a lasting positive impact on an African community.
True to the principles of social entrepreneurship, the ALA is run as a business. It is the first non-profit venture financed by the Industrial Development Corporation — with a loan of R30-million — and is expected to break even this year. Scholarships are available to all deserving applicants, but strictly according to a means test.
If a scholar’s family is wealthy enough, they will be expected to pay the full $25 000 school fees. The idea originated purely as a business response to a commercial opportunity. Swaniker, who grew up in Ghana, the Gambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, comes from a long line of educational entrepreneurs.
His grandmother started a school in Ghana and his mother, a teacher, started a private school in Botswana, which he helped run at the age of 18.
After an economics degree at an American university, he worked for the international consultancy McKinsey in Nigeria where he met wealthy families who complained about having to send their children to $50 000 schools in Europe and the United States.
There was clearly a huge opportunity for an African option. Bradford saw it from the other side. As an economics teacher at a top school in Britain, he taught many African pupils in a system “that was designed to prepare them to become English gentlemen”.
When the two of them met on an MBA course at Stanford University, “we had a lot to talk about and we did”, says Bradford. Swaniker started working on the business plan as just another class project, but by the time he finished his MBA — in the top 10% of his class — he was so fired up about the idea that he desperately wanted out of his contract with McKinsey, which paid for his studies.
“Begged, borrowed and scraped together” is how he repaid them, says Swaniker, which pretty much describes the years between 2004 and 2008 during which he and Bradford slowly put their idea into practice. It was a “blessing” that they started with no money, says Bradford. It forced them to network exhaustively and globally, which is what the ALA concept needed.
Swaniker says the process taught him the importance of piloting when starting up a venture. Among other things, they ran a winter school in Cape Town for students across Africa in order to test ideas and use the results to garner support.
The question whether the ALA will indeed make a significant difference to African leadership is still years away from being answered. The school has just had its third intake of students. But its power to transform individual lives has been apparent.
Among the first class of 93 students to graduate in June this year was Spencer Horne, who was raised single-handedly by his librarian mother in Kuils River, Cape Town. He is now studying engineering at Harvard on a full scholarship.
He says, that, even more important than the A-levels, which prepared him well for the Harvard workload, was his exposure to “brilliant minds” from all over Africa. He has no doubt that he will return one day and certainly not just because the deal requires him to pay back his school fees if he doesn’t do so within 10 years.
“You don’t attend ALA and go through the two years and leave without the intention of returning. I think that’s just somehow instilled in you,” he says.