A Note on YALI and Why It Mattered
A door out
To understand what the programme meant to me, you need to understand what it is like to be a young person in Zimbabwe who has spent years trying to find a door out — not out of the country permanently, but out toward the world. Some find their way through scholarships. Others through employment. The path I had been walking was the path of applications: fellowships, assistantships, leadership programmes, anything that moved the needle. YALI — the Young African Leaders Initiative — was one of those doors I had knocked on before and been turned away from. When the email arrived in February 2024 confirming my place in Cohort 23, I was at the office. I went back to my desk and read it three times.
The programme selects from over ten thousand applicants across Africa. It brought seventy-seven of us from thirteen countries, across civic, business and public sector tracks to the University of South Africa campus for three weeks of leadership training. It is the kind of programme that looks good on a CV and changes something quietly inside you at the same time. Somewhere on the continent, at approximately the same hour, Vanessa received the same email and felt, I imagine, something close to what I felt. We did not know each other yet. We would meet in a classroom, over a borrowed charger, days later.
It is worth being clear about what YALI is and is not. It is not the Mandela Washington Fellowship — the most coveted branch of the initiative, the one that takes you to the United States. This was the Regional Leadership Centre programme, run on the continent. But it is no consolation prize. It is competitive enough that people apply repeatedly and never get in, and the hybrid cohort — the one that takes you to South Africa in person rather than keeping you online — is harder still to land. Being selected adds something real to your name, and the network it gives you reaches well beyond your own borders. It matters.
The fellowship runs along three tracks: Civic Leadership, Business and Entrepreneurship, and Public Management. I was on the Civic Leadership track, which might seem an odd fit for someone whose training is in statistics and data science. The path there was less direct than my degree. While studying statistics I had joined a peer-education club, ended up as its president, and through it found my way into the world of NGOs, civic space, humanitarian work, and the wider UN family. I liked it enough that working for one of the UN agencies became a long-term ambition. So although my day job was as a Monitoring and Evaluation specialist — numbers, indicators, surveys — I carried real experience in advocacy alongside it.
Not long before applying, I had conceived a campaign aimed at ending child marriage and teenage pregnancy — the #NotInMyVillage campaign — which had drawn attention from UNFPA Zimbabwe and others. I am fairly certain that campaign is what won me the place. I made it the centrepiece of my application; it was my selling point. So the purpose of YALI, for me, was to sharpen my advocacy, to learn to design programmes that actually change the communities they are meant to serve. That was the civic track.
But the days were not only classes. Alongside the lectures on different topics, we travelled around the country, visiting organisations doing work connected to our own, seeing how change was being made in practice. It meant group projects, shared meals, evenings out exploring wherever we were staying as a team, and weekends with no class at all and even more time together. And because Vanessa and I were in the same class, it meant that sooner or later we would end up in the same groups. Interesting times were coming — though I did not know it yet. All I knew was that I was a man with a charger that did not fit the sockets, and that she was sitting two rows behind me.
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