2025 Tutu Fellow Diaraye Diallo writes in her essay for the Tutu Leadership Fellowship, that Africa’s greatest challenge is not a lack of resources, leadership, or global support. It is a lack of shared ownership of its future.

She contends that the continent must urgently transition from a culture of expectation to one of responsibility, where every citizen, not just political leaders, embrace their role in shaping national outcomes. At the center of this transformation lies education. More than a tool for development, education is a mechanism of empowerment: it equips individuals to understand their rights, engage in civic processes, and hold systems accountable.

She explores explores how short-term political incentives, underinvestment in human capital, and weak public participation in major development deals undermine long-term progress. Drawing on positive examples from mobile payment systems to AI-powered learning, she argues that education, when linked with technology and civic culture, can catalyze a bottom-up transformation.

The full essay follows - Moving from expectation to ownership : Africans must reclaim leadership accountability.

Introduction

Africa’s most enduring struggle is not just poor leadership. It is the persistent absence of shared ownership. Across the continent, development is too often outsourced: to governments, donors, consultants, and aid institutions. This has created a culture where citizens watch their futures unfold from the sidelines, waiting for someone else to act. But transformation does not happen to a society, it is built by it.

This essay argues that reclaiming Africa’s future requires a bold shift from expectation to ownership not just among political leaders, but among all citizens. Leadership is not confined to high office; it is a daily act of responsibility. When people see themselves as stakeholders, not spectators, accountability becomes possible.

At the heart of this shift is education. Education equips citizens with the tools to ask questions, demand answers, and act with agency. It enables them to influence how investments are shaped, how leaders are chosen, and how progress is defined. In its absence, dependency, corruption, and disempowerment thrive. With it, a new civic consciousness can emerge, one that holds every African accountable for the continent’s trajectory.

Breaking the culture of expectation and disempowerment

Despite receiving billions in aid and investment, African countries continue to lag in development outcomes. One core issue is the disconnect between external funding and national ownership. Much of this funding is absorbed in upstream activities: strategy development, technical assistance, workshops, and administration. By the time implementation is due, funds are exhausted, and communities are left with documents and fragmented pilot projects. Often, these efforts duplicate existing initiatives or reflect donor priorities more than national ones.

Compounding the issue, many African governments sign large-scale investment deals particularly in energy, infrastructure, and mining, that fail to deliver lasting value for local communities. Without widespread education, citizens are not equipped to articulate needs, assess trade-offs, or challenge agreements. This limits public scrutiny and reinforces a pattern where decisions are made for people, not with them. This dynamic entrenches passivity. People expect development to be delivered from the top or the outside. As a result, civic engagement remains weak and institutional accountability elusive.

Education as the foundation of ownership - Transformative leadership in Africa must start with the recognition that no one else is coming to fix the continent’s challenges. That recognition must be embedded in education systems.

Yet most African countries underinvest in education. Public spending often favors high-visibility projects over long-term systems like schooling, vocational training, and research. One reason is political: the impacts of quality education are not immediately visible and rarely align with short electoral cycles. By contrast, countries in Southeast Asia like Vietnam and South Korea have demonstrated how sustained investment in education and innovation can accelerate development. They prioritized literacy, teacher training, research institutions, and STEM education early on, laying the foundation for globally competitive economies and high civic awareness. Educated citizens are not just economically productive, they are politically empowered. They know their rights, recognize corruption, and can demand better public services. Education enables communities to scrutinize government actions, participate in development, and shape the future collectively.

To make education a true engine of transformation, African leadership itself must evolve across government, business, and civil society. The issue is not a shortage of plans or visions, but a chronic failure of implementation and prioritization. Too often, leaders focus on high-profile projects with short-term visibility, rather than investing in systems that deliver long-term impact. Education reform, in particular, is frequently sidelined because it requires patience, continuity, and humility—qualities that are often at odds with election cycles and ego-driven politics.

Leadership in Africa must become more servant-oriented, systemic, and future-literate. Servant leadership, places people’s needs first and builds trust over time. Systemic leadership requires breaking down silos and coordinating education reforms across ministries, local governments, and private actors. Future-literate leadership means adopting foresight tools, listening to younger generations, and planning beyond political mandates.

To accelerate this shift, Africa must invest in ethical leadership development, youth mentorship programs, and political reforms that reward long-term thinking.

Breaking the potential trap

Africa is rich in resources, talent, and culture. But potential alone is not a strategy. Too often, the continent celebrates its demographic and natural endowments without building the systems needed to convert them into long-term value. Consider the resource curse: nations with abundant natural wealth often struggle to translate it into broad-based development. In Africa, mineral and oil extraction has frequently enriched elites and foreign investors, while local communities remain marginalized. This is in part due to weak regulatory frameworks, but also to under-educated populations who lack the tools to monitor revenues, understand contracts, or advocate for community benefits.

Same for agriculture, African nations continue to import billions in food despite abundant arable land. Meanwhile, countries with fewer natural advantages have turned themselves into global suppliers by focusing on applied research and farmer support. Similarly, Africa’s youthful population is regularly cited as an asset, but without access to quality education and skills, this demographic dividend risks becoming a liability. Without investment in people, potential remains untapped, and cycles of poverty and disenfranchisement persist.

While education reform is a long-term endeavor, technology presents opportunities to accelerate progress. Africa has already demonstrated its capacity for innovation-led leapfrogging. One of the most powerful examples is the rise of mobile money. Services like M-Pesa in Kenya, Orange Money and Wave in West Africa amongst others, have extended financial inclusion to millions, often outpacing traditional banking systems in reach and efficiency. This same logic can be applied to education. AI-powered platforms, digital tutoring tools, and mobile learning solutions have the potential to complement traditional schooling.

They can help fill gaps in teacher shortages, provide access to quality learning materials, and bring education to remote or underserved areas, or provide targeted education modules in local languages. Programs like Eneza Education in Kenya and Rwanda’s Smart Classroom initiative illustrate how locally adapted technologies can drive scalable change. Governments and entrepreneurs must work together to ensure that digital tools are used inclusively and sustainably. Technology can not replace teachers, but empower them. Likewise, AI should be used to enhance, not commercialize educational outcomes.
Pathways to collective ownership - To reclaim accountability and accelerate development, Africa must commit to a civic and educational transformation. This involves:

1. Recognizing education as a foundational investment, protected from short-term political cycles and sustained across administrations.
2. Empowering citizens through civic education, so they can meaningfully engage in public policy, budgeting, and electoral processes.
3. Harnessing technology and AI to make education more accessible, adaptive, and contextually relevant.
4. Building a culture of accountability where responsibility is distributed, not only expected from top leadership.
5. Ensuring inclusive investment planning, where affected communities can shape, evaluate, and benefit from national projects.

These are not utopian goals. They are necessary foundations for a resilient, democratic, and prosperous Africa.

Conclusion

Africa’s future will not be determined by donor summits or ministerial declarations. It will be shaped by Africans who recognize that responsibility cannot be delegated. Leadership accountability is not the burden of a few, it is the collective duty of all. When citizens are educated and engaged, they do not wait for promises, they demand progress. They question, participate, and build. Education, therefore, is not only a tool for development, it is the architecture of agency. Let us stop speaking only of Africa’s potential, and start building the systems that convert it into prosperity. Let us shift from passive expectation to active ownership. Because if Africans do not own their future, someone else will.

Essay by Diaraye Diallo for the 2025 Tutu Leadership Fellowship Programme.