In August 2018, the African Leadership Institute launched its seminal report titled: An Abundance of Young African Leaders, but No Seat at the Table at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. Fast forward to 2019, AFLI launched a fully-searchable directory built on the data in the report. It lists all of the organisations providing leadership development training to young African leaders.

The problem with many directories, however, is finding anything useful. In the leadership directory, it is possible to search by any piece of text, by programme type, region, country, alphabetically, sponsors or a range of other datasets - and get a list.

All of the 105 organisations mentioned in the report were sourced from a survey conducted by the African Leadership Institute's Project Pakati. This online searchable directory, which profiles leadership initiatives across the continent, was launched on 1 May 2019. The launch was conducted on Project Pakati’s, social media, twitter platform. Each day, two organisations are profiled to amplify the leadership programmes in the directory.

As referenced in the report, the typology of African Youth Leadership Initiatives identified from the research were divided into four main categories:

• Leadership Development Programmes, which had the largest number of initiatives
• Leadership Mentorship Programmes with 10 initiatives
• Leadership Networking Platforms with 15 initiatives
• Leadership Impact Platforms with 35 initiatives

All the 105 leadership initiatives focus on young African leaders between the ages of 18-40, and those meeting other specified criteria included in this study.

Note - when this article was written, the youth-serving directory was on the Pakati subsite. This directory was migrated in July 2021 to a standalone site of its own at YouthForYouth.Africa