Michael Olugbode in Abuja
The African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have called for increased investment in leadership development across Africa’s public sector, saying technical expertise, sound policies and institutional systems alone cannot deliver sustainable reforms.
They made the call on Thursday at a webinar organised by ACBF on ‘Leading Public Sector Transformation in Africa: Leadership Lessons from the LEAPS Programme’, where participants examined how leadership capacity could help governments overcome resistance, strengthen public financial management (PFM) and translate reforms into measurable institutional results.
Executive Secretary of ACBF, Mr. Mamadou Biteye, said public-sector reform was rarely constrained by a shortage of good ideas, but more often by the ability to lead change, build trust, bring stakeholders together, overcome resistance and sustain momentum.
He said African governments were undertaking ambitious PFM reforms aimed at mobilising domestic resources, improving public investment, strengthening budgeting and enhancing expenditure management.
However, he noted that progress remained uneven, with leadership, coordination and implementation continuing to rank among the continent’s major capacity challenges.
According to him, this was the rationale behind the establishment of the Leadership Excellence for Africa’s Public Sector (LEAPS) programme by ACBF, with support from the Gates Foundation.
Biteye said the programme was founded on the recognition that while technical expertise was essential, it was insufficient to deliver 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,” he said.
He explained that LEAPS moves beyond conventional training by combining structured leadership learning with self-assessment, personal development plans, individual and group coaching, peer learning, technical seminars and case-based application to real PFM challenges.
Senior Programme Officer, Development Policy and Finance at the Gates Foundation, Mr. Adil Ababou, said the experience of working with ACBF on LEAPS had reinforced three major lessons about public-sector reform.
He said the first was that institutions and systems do not reform themselves; people lead reforms.
Ababou said many of the most difficult challenges facing public finance officials were not purely technical, but involved building consensus around difficult reforms, managing resistance, working across institutional boundaries and sustaining momentum when political or economic circumstances changed.
He said this was particularly important for public finance because the decisions of ministries of finance, revenue authorities, treasuries and other public institutions ultimately determine governments’ ability to fund schools, healthcare, social protection and other services.
“In the context of abrupt aid cuts, government finance is now, more than ever, the backbone of sustained and nationally owned development,” he said.
Ababou identified ownership as the second major lesson from the LEAPS experience, explaining that the programme was deliberately designed not to impose predetermined reforms or solutions on participating countries.
Instead, he said, the approach begins by understanding the capacity needs of participating institutions, after which participants receive sustained coaching while retaining responsibility for defining the problems they want to address and the objectives they want to achieve.
He said this was increasingly important as African countries placed greater emphasis on sovereignty, policy ownership and defining their own development priorities.
His third lesson was that leadership could not remain an individual capability.
“Successful reform requires teams, institutions and networks of officials who are able to work across the administrative silos that often characterise government,” he said.
Ababou noted that individual reformers could have much greater impact when their institutions gave them the space to act, senior leaders supported them and they were able to build coalitions around change.
“That is when individual leadership can start generating institutional momentum,” he said.
The LEAPS programme, a six-month executive leadership development initiative delivered through ACBF’s Ubora Academy, has enrolled more than 295 participants across eight African countries since its launch in 2024.
The countries reached are Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
The programme combines self-paced online learning with live facilitated sessions, executive coaching, group mentoring, technical seminars and peer exchange.
Its five modules cover African leadership paradigms; self-awareness and emotional intelligence; leading high-performing and inclusive teams; driving strategic organisational change; and engaging stakeholders and driving systemic transformation.
Biteye said early evidence from the first cohort showed that participants were translating their leadership development into institutional improvements.
In Kenya, participants demonstrated how people-centred leadership could complement technical expertise in advancing digital PFM reforms and securing stakehol
