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In March 2020, the African Leadership Institute announced the Associates who had been selected for the 2020 Class of the Tutu Fellowship programme.  As has been the case with previous cohorts, the people selected were exceptional emerging African leaders. AFLI received more than 300 nominees of outstanding quality from 36 African countries, from which the cohort was selected. Before the class could begin, COVID intervened and the programme was deferred until conditions allowed for an in-person convening.

Since that initial announcement of the cohort was made, not all of the candidates were still able to participate in the programme. The names below represent the final cohort who begin the first workshop in the programme in South Africa next week.

Back on 22 May 2021, President Samia Suluhu Hassan appointed Elsie Kanza PhD as one of 22 ambassadors for Tanzania. Elsie is a 2008 Tutu Fellow.  On 17 August, she was posted to the Embassy in Washington, DC, as Tanzanian Ambassador. The US Embassy is considered a senior posting in diplomatic circles.  In May, President Hassan made the appointments, but did not at that time name the posts to which the appointees would be stationed. 

The appointments included senior government officials, members of the military, and government and cabinet advisors.  Prior to her appointment, Elsie's most recent position was as the Special Advisor to the President of the World Economic Forum.

2019 Tutu Fellow Ronak Gopaldas has written a paper on the double-edged sword that COVID-19 presents to Africa. It is forcing a re-emphasis of the role and importance of the state in a post-COVID-19 era. Bigger government with an expanding reach and relevance has significant governance implications for Africa, which has a record and history of weak governance, ineffective institutions, limited resources, corruption, and mismanagement.

Ronak says that if Africa uses the pandemic effectively for effective structural transformation, it could usher in significant opportunity for political and economic improvement.  If not, pressures will intensify, leaving Africa floundering under the impact of economic and COVID-19-induced shocks.

2017 Tutu Fellow Natalie Jabangwe has joined Sanlam as the Group Digital Executive Officer. Sanlam was founded in 1918 and has evolved from being an insurance company into a multinational, diversified financial services group offering services to individuals and institutional clients. Sanlam has an international footprint, with a presence in 34 African countries, India and Malaysia.. 

One of Natalie's first major communications roles was the rollout of the company joining the Every Action Counts coalition, which connects experts in nature conservation and climate change with some of the world’s leading digital platforms, financial institutions, and consumer goods firms. The coalition promotes best practices to equip citizens to understand better their role in living sustainably. The coalition was launched by the Green Digital Alliance, a nonprofit which seeks to leverage digital technologies and innovations to enhance financing for sustainable development.

2014 Tutu Fellow Ladé Araba is serving on the Green Outcomes Fund Advisory Committee.  Ladé Araba is a senior development finance executive and board member with more than 18 years of experience.

The Green Outcomes Fund (GOF) incentivises local South African fund managers to increase investment in green, small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs).  The GOF is a new and unique structure that aims to catalyse higher quality and consistent green impacts. It has as one of its key goals the building of a common set of green metrics within the local investment industry.

2018 Tutu Fellow Oluseun Onigbinde has launched his debut book The Existential Questions: Uncomfortable facts confronting Nigeria after a 60-year journey.  Nigeria's 60th anniversary took place in October 2020. He asks the question 'why has the country failed to live up to its potential', and his answers lie within the 285-page softcover.

Oluseun looks at where his country is and how it got there by examining Nigerian leadership, the country's socio-economic status, its weak legal and judicial systems, and other human development systems and arrives at the conclusion that Nigeria has been grossly mismanaged.  But he doesn't stop there.

In the second of our Tutu Talks series, 2018 Tutu Fellow Nozipho Tshabalala says that in her role as a facilitator of conversations, she has drawn, and continues to draw, inspiration and guidance from the teachings of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. She says she continues to carry these as tools of her trade as she moderates confrontational conversations. 

If you're wondering why she uses the term 'confrontational conversations', she says that in a well-designed confrontational conversation, 'something has to yield', making space for change.  A confrontational conversation is not the same as violence, she says, nor is the fruit that it bears the same.  Rather, she says, questions can be used to reframe the understanding of issues.

2018 Tutu Fellow Temi Marcella Awogboro has written thought piece titled Blockchain: The Opportunity for the Africa Market.  In it, she poses the question as to whether blockchain technology can not just open new vistas for African business and society, but go further - help developing nations leapfrog more developed economies?  She points out that a lack of existing infrastructure has been used as an opportunity by developing nations in the past. An example has been the early adoption of digital technology, leading developed nations with heavily established analogue infrastructure.

She says the potential benefits for a developing economy being early adopters of blockchain are extensive. These include increased transparency, more efficient and cost-effective transactions, and growth in local technological centres to build up infrastructure and export knowledge learned.

A 2010 Tutu Fellow and the CEO of the African Leadership Institute, Jackie Chimhanzi PhD, has been appointed to the Board of the international organisation, the ONE Campaign.  ONE is a global movement, campaigning to end extreme poverty and preventable disease by 2030. ONE’s Board of Directors includes individuals with extensive experience in advocacy and activism, policy, politics and business.

The board includes Aliko Dangote, the President of the Dangote Group; U2's Bono; the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron; African good governance advocate, Mo Ibrahim; Susan Buffett of the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation; Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg; and the former US Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers. Jackie, a 2010 Tutu Fellow, was appointed to the 20-person board in May 2020.

For Africa Day 2021, the African Leadership Institute sent an open Letter to African Heads of State, calling on them to include more young people in governance. It held a Zoom meeting with a high-level panel on the current poor representation of young people in governance that was widely attended. The Open Letter is published at Publications. You can watch the full Zoom meeting on AFLI's YouTube Channel.

Globally, Africa has the youngest population in the world, yet many are unemployed or marginalised. The average age on the continent is 19, yet in 2018, the average age of African Heads of State was 64 and a half years old. In it's letter to heads of government, AFLI challenged them to rectify this disproportional state of affairs.

The Open Letter was also picked up by news media.

On 22 May 2021, President Samia Suluhu Hassan appointed Elsie Kanza PhD as one of 22 ambassadors for Tanzania. Elsie is a 2008 Tutu Fellow.  

A statement issued by the director of communications at State House, Gerson Msigwa read that "The appointment of these Ambassadors commenced today, May 22, 2021 and they will be sworn in on dates to be announced later."

Elsie's most recent position was as the Special Advisor to the President of the World Economic Forum.

The African Leadership Institute has partnered with the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation to produce a series of profiles on Tutu Fellows called Tutu Talks.  The foundation is responsible for preserving the example set by Archbishop Desmond Tutu for the future. 

The first of our 2021 Tutu Talks series features 2017 Tutu Fellow, Samantha Mkandhla, the head of philanthropy and partnerships for Médecins Sans Frontières Southern Africa. In it, she tells of the personal cost of servant leadership, and how she learned to overcome it and still work to make the world a better place. Her talk is called The Power of Duality: Success and Failure. In it, she spoke about how her failures led her to a clearer sense of what she had gained and how much more she had to give.

Apolitical has published its list of 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy, a prestigious international list that honours and celebrates people working on gender policy who are making the world more equitable. They made their selection by considering people in areas that include policymaking, public service, research, philanthropy, advocacy and activism. Drawn from more than 1,100 nominations, 2018 Tutu Fellow Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg was selected in the Economic Justice and Rights category. 

Apolitical is an organisation that seeks to empower public servants through education, skills training, networking and 21st century digital tools.  Wanjiru is joined in the category in which she was honoured by 13 other women.

2008 Tutu Fellow Nitesh Dullabh has been appointed as Partner, Corporate Sustainability and Climate Change (CS&CC) at Environmental Resources Management, or ERM.  He began his new position in April 2021.

ERM is a leading sustainability consultancy, and the global sustainability and climate change practice provides innovative advisory services from Board engagement to operationalizing sustainability.  Environmental sustainability has become a business-critical issue for many enterprises. Nitesh intends to building on his sustainability experience and leverage ERM’s business process transformation capability, deep subject-matter expertise, and experienced teams.  This includes assisting local and global clients to integrate environmental sustainability practices into the fabric of their organizations for continuous improvement and to unlock business value for current and future generations.

2016 Tutu Fellow Succès Masra PhD has offered condolences to the Deby family in a gracious message via social media on the death of Chad’s President, Idriss Deby, who was killed by rebels in the north of the country in April.  Succès thanked the former president for the thirty years he had had as leader of the country. 

Succès is a prominent opposition politician who had to seek shelter within the US embassy perimeter in N'Djamena only the month prior to Deby's death because of a security crackdown on his supporters. Protests erupted when Deby announced he was running for a sixth term, along with changes to the qualifying age of presidential candidates in a measure to disqualify the opposition. Deby was controversially re-elected to a sixth presidential term, only to be killed just hours later in circumstances in the north of the country.  His government played an important role in countering Islamic terrorism in the region and was supported by former colonial ruler, France, to that end.