The African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have called for greater investment in leadership development across Africa’s public sector, warning that technical expertise and sound policies alone cannot deliver sustainable institutional reforms.
The organisations made the call on Thursday during an ACBF webinar titled “Leading Public Sector Transformation in Africa: Leadership Lessons from the LEAPS Programme,” where participants examined the role of leadership in overcoming resistance, strengthening public financial management (PFM) and translating reforms into measurable institutional outcomes.
ACBF Executive Secretary, Mamadou Biteye, said public-sector reform was rarely held back by a lack of good ideas, but rather by the capacity to lead change, build trust, coordinate stakeholders, overcome resistance and sustain reform momentum.
He said African governments were pursuing ambitious PFM reforms to mobilise domestic resources, improve public investment, strengthen budgeting and enhance expenditure management, but leadership, coordination and implementation remained major capacity challenges.
Biteye explained that this gap informed the establishment of the Leadership Excellence for Africa’s Public Sector (LEAPS) programme by ACBF, with support from the Gates Foundation.
According to him, LEAPS recognises that while technical expertise is essential, it is insufficient for navigating complex institutional reforms.
“Reform leaders must do more than understand systems; they must inspire people, build trust, navigate competing interests, manage resistance, and sustain momentum when reforms become difficult,” Biteye said.
The six-month executive leadership programme, delivered through ACBF’s Ubora Academy, has enrolled more than 295 participants across eight African countries since its launch in 2024. The countries are Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
The programme combines self-paced online learning, facilitated sessions, executive coaching, group mentoring, technical seminars and peer learning. Its five modules cover African leadership paradigms, self-awareness and emotional intelligence, high-performing and inclusive teams, strategic organisational change, and stakeholder engagement and systemic transformation.
Gates Foundation Senior Programme Officer, Development Policy and Finance, Adil Ababou, said the LEAPS experience had demonstrated three key lessons: institutions do not reform themselves; reform must be owned by participating countries; and leadership must extend beyond individuals to teams, institutions and networks.
He said many of the toughest challenges confronting public finance officials were not purely technical, but involved building consensus, managing resistance, working across institutional boundaries and sustaining reforms amid changing political and economic circumstances.
Ababou also stressed the importance of national ownership, noting that LEAPS was designed not to impose predetermined solutions on participating countries. Instead, the programme identifies institutional capacity needs and provides sustained coaching while participants retain responsibility for defining the challenges and objectives they seek to address.
He further argued that individual leadership would have limited impact without supportive institutions, senior-level backing and coalitions capable of driving change across administrative boundaries.
Early evidence from the programme indicates improvements in public-sector leadership practices in several participating countries. In Kenya, participants applied people-centred leadership to support digital PFM reforms and stakeholder alignment, while Senegal recorded improvements in delegation, participatory management and communication.
Ghana reported stronger accountability, goal-setting and collaboration between finance and audit institutions, while participants in Zimbabwe used reflective and empathetic leadership approaches to navigate complex reforms under challenging institutional and resource conditions.
An external evaluation of the programme is currently ongoing.
The webinar also marked the launch of the LEAPS Change Story, Advancing Leadership Excellence in Africa’s Public Sector: Insights from the LEAPS First Cohort, which documents leadership journeys, institutional outcomes and lessons from three cohorts across the eight participating countries.
The event further witnessed the launch of the expanded LEAPS Executive Leadership Programme, which is designed to extend access to public-sector and regional-body professionals across Africa through online learning, facilitated sessions, coaching, mentoring and technical seminars.
Biteye said the next priority was to ensure leadership development moved beyond selected individuals and became embedded within institutions.
He identified three priorities: institutionalising leadership development, moving from individual transformation to institutional transformation, and sustaining and scaling successful approaches.
He said LEAPS graduates should serve as mentors, reform champions and catalysts for broader changes in institutional culture.
Biteye said the programme ultimately reflected the central role of people in public-sector reform, stressing that systems, budgets, digital platforms and policies could not transform institutions without capable people to drive them.
ACBF, a specialised agency of the African Union established in 1991, has worked for more than three decades across more than 50 African countries to strengthen human and institutional capacity in governance, public financial management, economic policy and leadership.
