We Will Lead Africa (WWLA) is a global leadership storytelling platform, founded by Yabome Gilpin-Jackson, Sarah Owusu, and Judith Okonkwo.
It was established with the intent of curating and sharing stories, and creating networks of everyday African leaders, anywhere in the world, doing work impacting the progress of continental Africa.
Our Vision: Africans owning and leading our narratives.
Our Mission: Creating platforms for sharing and inspiring everyday African leadership through storytelling.
Our Actions:
- Curate and share stories of everyday African leadership through the WWLA volumes
- Convene networks of everyday African leaders to nurture connections, imagine possibilities, and propel bold action.
We believe in the power of storytelling – an inherent part of African culture – as a powerful tool for imagining, sparking, and driving progress, and as a way to inspire more change and shape the futures we want.
The founders
Yabome Gilpin-Jackson, PhD was born in Germany, grew up in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Canada and the United States. She is a multi-award-winning leadership and organisation development consultant, academic, writer, and curator of African identity and leadership stories. She has presented on and taught about ‘African Leadership: Now and for the Future.’ Yabome speaks on the issue of global African identities, which led to her writing and publishing short story collections entitled Identities, Ancestries, and Destinies. She regularly lectures and has peer-reviewed publications in her areas of interest. Yabome is a founder and lead editor of the We Will Lead Africa series.
Sarah Owusu is an organisation development and innovation consultant and co-founder of InkDot, with a focus on leading transformational change. She is a planetary citizen, Danish-Ghanaian, born in Botswana, and is currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was named 2018 Emerging OD Practitioner by the Organization Development Network and won the Women4Africa Award for Inspirational Woman of the Year. She has a master’s in philosophy and is an integral coach. Sarah is a founder and ongoing editor of the We Will Lead Africa series, and was lead editor of the second volume, Women.
Judith Okonkwo, who was born in London and grew up in Austria, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Japan, is an award-winning technology evangelist and business psychologist. She sits on the Boards of the Africa Deep Tech Foundation and XR Women, and advises organisations on emerging technologies. Judith is also the creator of the Oriki Coaching Model™, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 2016, Judith set up Imisi 3D a leading African ecosystem developer for the extended reality technologies. She is a member of World Economic Forum Initiatives, a 2023 Chen Yidan Visiting Global Fellow at Harvard, and an industry expert on immersive technologies for the OECD. Judith is a founder and ongoing editor of the We Will Lead Africa series, and the lead editor of the fifth volume, Technology, Science, Innovation.
