Page 7 - GENIUS MAGAZINE AFRICA 7TH EDITION

If it is absolutely clear that you are better prepared
than most because of these patterns you notice,
then this may just be that 1% of the time when you
should follow the new path.
Third: ‘Am I truly passionate?’ Impacting the world is
hard?—?so if you’re not really passionate about the
issue/cause at hand, your energy will fizzle out. You
should use the ‘sleepless night test’ for this one. If
the idea/issue you want to pursue is consuming you
so much that you can’t sleep at night, then it might
just qualify as that 1% idea.
If the answer to these three big questions
collectively is not a resounding ‘yes’, then you should
ignore the calling. It’s not your destiny. If, on the
other hand you reflect and find a clear ‘yes’ for each
question, then, and only then should you step up
and pursue this calling.
How the three big questions have shaped my life
Two years ago, I was faced with a moment of
obligation. I had been running the African
Leadership Academy for ten years, and was
disturbed by the fact that we could only admit 4% of
applicants and had to send 80% of our graduates to
study at top universities outside of Africa. I
wondered why we couldn’t have our own ‘Ivy
League’ on the continent. And then one day, an idea
came to me about how we could leverage changes in
technology and innovative pedagogy like peer to
peer learning to build the ‘university of the future’ in
Africa. Initially I tried to ignore it. I was tired of being
an entrepreneur, of going through all the stresses of
cash-flow issues, operational challenges, and people
issues. But the idea kept nagging at me.
So I applied my three questions: Is it big enough? The
vision was to build a network of 25 brand new
universities across Africa called ‘African Leadership
University’ (ALU). Each campus would have 10,000
students?—?i.e. 250,000 students at a time. Over
fifty-years, this would produce 3 million leaders,
innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists and game-
changers in almost any imaginable field for Africa.
ALU’s graduates could be the ones to lead the
continent out of poverty and desperation. The need
for this solution was massive. In Nigeria alone, 1.7m
students graduate each year from high school but
local universities can only absorb 400,000 of them.
6 would surely meet as we brought this new
What I had in mind would produce graduates
with skills more relevant for the 21st century
than most universities in the world today
produce. And we would be able to offer this
education at 10-20% of the cost of top US
universities today. Pioneering this fresh
approach to university education in a unique
and imaginative way would have ripple
effects not just in Africa but for the entire
world.
The ALU vision would ultimately require at
least $5 billion dollars in capital to pull off. So
this definitely ticked the box of ‘big enough’.
Am I uniquely positioned to do this? As I
reflected on this question, I realized that very
few people in the world were better
prepared to do this than I was. How many
people had lived and worked in ten African
countries and travelled to over twenty-five
and could therefore understand the
continent’s needs? How many people had
launched the African Leadership Network?
—?an association of 2,000 of the most
prominent leaders in Africa?—?who could
help pull this off? How many had been the
headmaster of a school in Botswana at the
age of 18, and
then gone on to launch African Leadership
Academy, developing a feeder network of
5,000 high schools in 48 countries that could
feed this university with applicants? How
many young African entrepreneurs had been
able to raise $100m on the global market for
their previous ventures? As I connected the
dots, I realized that the last 15 years had
been preparing me with the expertise,
know-how, and relationships to pull off this
much bigger feat. Raising $100m had been
the ‘training wheels’ I needed to raise
$5billlion. Building a world-class pre-
university institution on a small scale had
been practice to launch something on a far
larger scale at the tertiary level. Launching
the African Leadership Network had given
me access to influential people who could
help navigate all the regulatory hurdles we
model to life.