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2010 Tutu Fellow, academic, activist and author Robtel Neajai Pailey PhD has released her second book, Jaadeh!, the highly-anticipated sequel to her previous book, Gbagba, the anti-corruption children's book that has transformed elementary classrooms in Liberia.

In December 2018, Robtel also received an international anti-corruption excellence award for both books at a ceremony in Putrajaya, Malaysia for her work in shining light on corruption.

Wakanda is a fictional East African paradise made famous by the 2018 blockbuster film ‘Black Panther’. It is a well-developed, high-tech, highly functional country inhabited by warriors who possess mystical powers through a special substance only found in Wakanda called vibranium. Wakanda is a powerful and well-governed country. It is a proud nation which has its own official African language. As a result, it has garnered the respect of countries far outside of its borders.

Back on the real African continent, one struggles to find a country that matches the description of Wakanda in all respects. If anything, there is a growing instability around the continent that is unsettling.

The African Leadership Institute was founded by Sean Lance and myself – Peter Wilson. Sean is a very successful South African businessman, now retired and living in Plettenberg Bay. I had known Sean for many years as a fierce competitor on the sports field, and as we knew each other’s capabilities, Sean contracted me to do some scenario-based strategy consulting work for his team when he was Chief Operating Officer and a Board member of Glaxo-Wellcome in London – and scheduled to become CEO of the second biggest company by market capitalisation on the London Stock Exchange. A few weeks before he was due to become CEO he disagreed with the Board over the proposed merger with SmithKlineBeecham and thus left Glaxo to become CEO and ultimately Chairman of Chiron, a big-four biotechnology company based in San Francisco. Having established a working relationship at Glaxo, when he moved he asked me to help him restructure the strategy of this fast-growing company. Sean and I worked closely on this task for five years, and during this time, we often spoke after hours about what we could do to give back to the continent of our heritage. Both of us have deep roots in Africa going back about 200 years.

2011 Tutu Fellow Jacqueline Muna Musiitwa has been appointed to the United Nations Committee for Development Policy. She joins 23 other experts. 

The Comittee for Development Policy is a subsidiary of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and advises the Council on a wide range of issues that are relevant for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The 24 members who serve on the committee are nominated in their personal capacity by the U.N. Secretary-General and are appointed by ECOSOC to reflect a wide range of development experience as well as geographical and gender balance.

Statement by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellows on the unrest in Zimbabwe
17th January 2019

The Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellows of the African Leadership Institute are a diverse group of civic, political and business leaders from 40 African countries, who are concerned with the governance and development of the African continent. We, the Tutu Fellows, are alarmed by the growing unrest in Zimbabwe and, most worryingly, by the Zimbabwean government’s reaction to it. The unrest by ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe is in response to a hike in the fuel price in Zimbabwe, which is now the most expensive in the region.

2016 Tutu Fellow, Tshepo Ditshego, has been appointed as the CEO of Fundi, a fintech group across South Africa and Zimbabwe that offers technology services related to education like educational loans, bursary management and cashless payment solutions for schools. 

A play on the African word 'fundi', which means a learned person and the association with funding, Fundi is a leading education finance organisation in Southern Africa.  Access to finance to fund an education is a barrier many potential students face.

2008 Tutu Fellow Bibi Bakare-Yusuf has won the 2018 African Literary Person of the Year award from Brittle Paper. 

The Brittle Paper Award recognizes individuals who work behind the scenes to hold up the African literary establishment in the given year.  Bibi Bakare-Yusuf was recognised for her long service and leadership in publishing as well as her disruptive approach.  It celebrates a literary personality who has taken the lead in challenging and expanding assumptions about what it means to be an African creative. Brittle Paper says that it recognizes individuals for this award who explore Africa as a powerful idea that does not restrain creativity but inspires the most boundary-pushing and revolutionary work.

Earlier this year, AFLI carried a piece on how 2017 Tutu Fellow Yap Boum has been engaged in the battle against Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Yap is a microbiologist and epidemiologist with Epicentre Africa, an association created in the 80's by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) that set up a vaccine trial protocol with the Congolese government using an Ebola vaccine developed by Merck to be given selectively to those most likely to have had contact with a person carrying the disease.  Trial protocols are required for approval for use of experimental drugs. Since then, the battle against the outbreak has been in the news around the planet.

Yap told us as the year draws to a close that the battle continues and that it is serious.  He said that in less than six months, the DRC has seen two unrelated Ebola outbreaks.

2014 Tutu Fellow Samuel Mensah, the founder and CEO of Kisua, has opened his second store at the Waterfront, in Cape town, South Africa. This comes just a few months after his collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Albertina Sisulu family on their Centenary lines.  Samuel has created a business providing a quality product with a strong brand that's available anywhere in the world. Seeing as the production is done in Cape town, it seemed ideal to also open a store in the mother city. 'Kisua' means 'Well-dressed person' in Swahili.  

Sam Mensah said that a spark behind Kisua was the appropriation of African design and fashion in London, Paris and New York while not bringing any jobs, income or benefits to Africans. 

A business school agricultural management program in Kenya started by two Tutu Fellows has reached another milestone. The agribusiness program was hatched by 2013 Fellow Nuradin Osman and 2015 Fellow Martin Mbaya at the 10-year celebration of AFLI in 2016.   The program seeks to be scalable and to teach young people to go into farming professionally, provide support for the African agricultural sector, and help farmers do more with less.  Students are now learning a range of hands-on skills and transitioning into work-placements. 

The pilot programme was launched towards the end of last year and more can be read about it here in AFLI News (see below). 

2009 Tutu Fellow Dr Julie Makani is on the 2018 list of the 100 Most Influential Africans compiled annually by New African Magazine.  She joins other Fellows in previous years who have been selected for this prestigious list. For years, she has been steadily working towards improving outcomes for people born with sickle-cell anaemia, a condition that disproportionately affects Africans, with more than 210 thousand children in Africa born each year with it.  

She is a Principal Investigator in Clinical Medicine at Oxford University and has researched the genomics of the disease to better understand the genetic and environmental factors affecting sickle-cell disease (SCD).  

Prolific author, academic, political economist and 2015 Tutu Fellow Landry Signé has released his latest book titled: African Development, African Transformation: How Institutions Shape Development Strategy. In it, he makes the case that Africa is home to many of the world's fastest-growing economies. The book traces new continental institutions for development and their capacity to affect economic growth, regional integration, and international cooperation in Africa.

More specifically, Landry examines the role of the African Union Development Agency (AUDA) in transforming African economies and facilitating interstate cooperation.

2017 Fellow Natalie Jabangwe has been appointed to the global Task Force on Digital Financing by the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres.  It caps a headline year for Natalie, who is the head of the company she founded, EcoCash.  In 2018, she was an AABLA Young Business Leader finalist, was selected as one of  four Tutu Fellows on the Choiseul 2018 list, and was also selected as a World Economic Forum 2018 Young Global Leader. 

She has also just listed CassavaSmarTech on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, which brings together a mobile money operator, a bank, and various smart tech services under one banner.  The digital task force to which she has been appointed will recommend strategies to harness the potential of financial technology in advancing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

A small farmer development project launched by 2017 Tutu Fellow Samuel Kariuki as part of his Fellowship is bringing new hope to a troubled area of Kenya.  The area is one of the country's most populated rural districts and once a leading coffee producer.  But social decline has led to poverty and hopelessness, something Sam is turning around by giving locals tools to succeed.  In an outgrower program that occurred in conjunction with the Fort Hall Eye project, he recently shared some examples.  One is of a farmer growing organic sweet potatoes.

He said that a typical sweet potato, planted in the traditional way, weighs about 750 grams.  The lead small farmer in his outgrower program has produced a 6 kg sweet potato (see photo top) and over a 90-day period, earned about $3,600 USD from his patch of land. 

2014 Tutu Fellow Mireille Tushiminina has given a keynote address to the US military Africa Command leadership (AFRICOM) in Garnish, Germany, where she spoke about the socio-economic dimension of conflict in African fragile states and the dire need for security reform. She was joined on stage by United States Marine Corps General Thomas D. Waldhauser, who is the fourth Commander of the United States Africa Command.

Addressing an small, select audience consisting of the senior US Africa Command leadership, people from the US State department and USAID, some spouses, and other diplomatic corps officials, Mireille’s half-hour keynote speech was part of an initiative aimed at understanding how Africans perceive the military and other security forces.