Young African Leaders Initiative

The Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) is an initiative of the United States Department of State. It was begun in 2010 by President Barack Obama. YALI is a programme aimed at educating and networking young African leaders with activities including the Mandela Washington Fellowship which brings them to study in the United States for six weeks, with follow-up resources, and student exchange programs. In 2014, the program was expanded to include four regional "leadership centers" in Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and South Africa.
500 participants in the Mandela Washington Fellowship arrived in the United States on June 16, 2014. In 2019 there were 700 fellows.
YALI Regional Leadership Center.
As part of efforts to decentralize and to reach a lot of young leaders, the Young African Leaders Initiative program created regional leadership centers across Africa known as the YALI Regional Leadership Center (RLC). Participants of the Regional Leadership Centers go through online and in-person training and are provided with professional development opportunities in these three track areas; Business and Entrepreneurship, Civil Society Management and Public Policy and Management.
The Regional Leadership Center can be located in West Africa with centers in Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Accra, Ghana and Centre Africain d’Etudes Supérieures en Gestion (CESAG), Dakar, Senegal the Accra Center has a satellite campus at the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON), near Lagos, Nigeria. The one at Dakar, Senegal is for French speaking West Africans.
There is a YALI Regional Leadership Center for East Africans, it is located at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya it serves citizens of the following countries: Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.
The Southern African Regional Leadership Center is at University of South Africa (UNISA) School of Business Leadership (SBL), near Pretoria, South Africa with a satellite campus at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique for Portuguese speakers.