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The African Leadership Institute, through Pakati, is developing a directory to assist African NGO's led by and serving the youth of the continent. Titled the African Youth-Led and Youth-Serving Organizations Portal, the project recognises the impact youth-led organizations have: It provides an important outlet for employment, being run and staffed by young people, and they ignite active citizenry and volunteerism at community levels. But these types of organisations face challenges. They are generally poorly-funded, because donors and funders have difficulty finding and identifying these organisations. Additionally, youth-led and youth-serving organizations do not leverage lessons learnt by other similar organizations, as information-sharing opportunities are limited.

Governments also do not acknowledge the important contributions these organizations make, resulting in young people becoming frustrated at not getting credit or support for their role in improving the social and economic development of their communities.

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.

The Youth Advisory Board for the Ford Foundation-funded Pan African leadership project will play a critical role in the governance of the project. The board has been intentionally constituted up front at the start of the grant project to provide strategic inputs and provide overall guidance of the project and its implementation.

Two ex officio members will sit on the board in addition to the eminent young Africans on the board. The first is a member of AFLI - which is the grant recipient. The second is a member of the African Union Commission’s Youth Division.