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Looking ahead

Written by The WWLA Founders
Edited by Michelle Mocumbi

Photo by Ran Berkovich on Unsplash.

As We Will Lead Africa (WWLA) approaches its tenth year, we do so at a moment of profound global transition. Old centres of power are straining to maintain relevance, familiar systems are cracking, and the language of ‘the future’ is once again being spoken loudly about Africa, often by those who have only just remembered that the continent exists.

From global consultancies to innovation firms, investors, builders, business people, impact drivers and cultural tastemakers, there is renewed interest in Africa as ‘the next frontier’. Some of this attention is genuine. Much of it is not. History reminds us that waves of external enthusiasm often carry extractive intent, dressed up in new vocabulary: innovation, development, disruption, opportunity.

In this context, clarity becomes an act of resistance.

As WWLA moves into its next chapter, the moment feels both urgent and expansive. We are doubling down on our conviction that Africans must own and lead our narratives, and that WWLA is more than a series of publications—it’s a movement grounded in storytelling as a force for leadership, imagination, and transformation.

For nearly a decade, this global network has curated and shared stories of everyday African leaders—people whose work is impacting the continent whether they live in Accra, Johannesburg, Montreal, or London. These stories are not exceptional outliers; they are evidence of leadership emerging from community, resilience, creativity, and grounded action. These are the stories you do not hear about in popular media when African leadership is spoken of, and we are determined to gather and share them on our platforms.

Owning our story, anchoring our agency

One of the strongest themes emerging from our recent leadership conversations is the urgency of being deeply, unmistakably clear about who we are, what we offer, and what we want for ourselves. Not as a reaction to outside forces, but as a grounded declaration of agency.

For WWLA, this means continuing to insist that African leadership, expertise, imagination, and solutions do not need to be imported, translated, or validated elsewhere. The continent does not lack insight. It lacks platforms that consistently amplify what is already working, already emerging, already led from within.

Too often, African contexts are framed solely through crisis and deficit. Yet alongside the visible fractures are countless examples of resilience, creativity, and possibility. Our work has always been about learning to see through the mess, to notice where systems are failing, yes, but also where cracks are letting in light.

The pull of despair

The risk of this moment is not only external extraction, but also internal despair. When global instability meets long-standing local challenges, it becomes easy to disengage; to adopt a ‘what will be, will be’ posture; or to believe that the responsibility and accountability lie elsewhere and must come only from political elites, global powers, divine intervention, and fate itself.

But the future of the continent is not abstract and it is not shaped solely by those to whom we bestow power. It is shaped by the daily choices, voices, and actions of those who also choose to lead, build, and respond to local needs. It belongs to those who refuse to respond only with despair.

WWLA exists precisely to counter the quiet erosion of belief. To remind African leaders, practitioners, and thinkers that agency is not optional. That hope is not naïve. That leadership is not reserved for titles or positions, but practised through presence, intention, and courage.

Photo by Dominic I on Unsplash.

Resistance can be joy

Looking ahead, we are also making a deliberate shift in how resistance to the dominant narrative can be countered and imagined. We are engaging in our work not as struggle, but joyful practice. Not only as critique, but as creation. We want to inspire vision and agency, yes, and also pause, joy, and renewal along the way.

In the midst of uncertainty, choosing to celebrate, to gather, to imagine, and to build is itself transformational. Joy becomes a strategy for thriving in the midst. Creativity becomes a form of refusal. Community becomes infrastructure.

This is not escapism. It is sustainability.

By holding space for reflection and engaging in what brings joy, our purpose is renewed. Possibilities and energy to keep taking action are regenerated. We are working from a place of abundance rather than deficit. At WWLA, we will continue to model a leadership posture that is both sober about reality and deeply committed to possibility.

The voice we choose to be

As we move forward, the question is not whether the continent will be spoken about. It will. The real question is: what voice will we be in the midst of the noise?

Will we be a platform that reminds Africans of their own power?
Will we challenge one-sided narratives by offering grounded, lived perspectives?
Will we inspire action—even if in small, quiet, local ways?

If even one person reclaims agency, one organisation chooses collaboration over extraction, one leader sees possibility where they once saw only constraint, then the work matters.

Looking ahead

The next chapter of WWLA is not about reacting to global shifts, but about deepening roots. About being unmistakably Africa-centred. About insisting—again and again—that the continent’s future must be shaped by those who live, work, dream, and lead her.

We were never waiting to be saved.

As Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulous reminds: we were seeds all along.1

Questions for the continent

As we step into the year ahead—and toward our tenth year—we invite reflection, dialogue, and action. 

  1. What does African leadership look like when it is grounded in agency rather than reaction?
  2. Where are you already shaping the future of the continent, even if no one is applauding?
  3. What would it mean to choose joy, community, and creativity as acts of resistance and transformation?
  4. How are you contributing—however quietly—to what Africa is becoming?

Nobody else will define this future for us. And nobody else should.

As we wrote at the very start of our journey:

Africa, my Africa, no not Diop’s, mine!
An open expanse for my
learning,
love, and
life.
Yet some say, this,
my Africa,
calabash for my soul,
is only a place of strife.
And yet,
here my heart,
always free,
finds time.

Africa, our Africa,
both brash and subtle,
both bold and humble.
Carrying a legacy of story,
drumming to its heartbeat alone
Loving and loud,
too patient, proud?
Performing,
Providing,
and waiting for us to shape futures untold

Africa, your Africa,
but wait
… will you be hers?
The mother, the bride, the nurturer, life giver.
With dedication, and action, into a future of our own making.
We choose…
no longer a-waiting,
because this Africa…
She is mine, yours, ours.

1 Mina, AX, ‘On the Origins of “They Tried to Bury Us, They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds”’, Hyperallergic (3 July 2018), https://hyperallergic.com/on-the-origins-of-they-tried-to-bury-us-they-didnt-know-we-were-seeds/, accessed 26 Jan 2026.

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What we see for the future of We Will Lead Africa

A We Will Lead Africa Founders’ Conversation, edited by Michelle Mocumbi

Photo by Paulius Dragunas on Unsplash.

Our annual reflection and planning for the year ahead is upon us.

Despite it being a question we regularly return to, on this week, in this year, somehow it felt particularly heavy: What do you see for the future of We Will Lead Africa (WWLA)?

At first, the word future only evoked exhaustion. The world around us seems once again to be cracking open: another political meltdown, another anti-immigration narrative, another devastating kidnapping of schoolgirls, another moment when despair chokes the horizon.

And yet, when we attached the question to WWLA, something shifted.

This, we realised, is the work: continuously returning to story, specifically the everyday African leadership stories that fuel the WWLA movement.

In the conversation, Judith offered the story of the Igbo Landing—those ancestors who, in the face of unimaginable captivity, refused the future laid out for them and walked into the water, choosing dignity and agency over enslavement. In XR Artist Chizara Ibeakanma’s re-imagining of that story, as resistance grew within each person, a light began to glow from inside them. And when they walked into the water, the entire scene glowed—hope as illumination, hope as refusal, hope as belonging to something larger than the moment.

That sense of hope is what we connect with when we envisage WWLA’s future.

Not because the world is less chaotic, but because despite the chaos, there are lights among us—leaders, everyday people—who kindle hope, agency, and shared humanity. We will continue to be the place where that light is named, nurtured, and witnessed.

Yabome affirmed the importance of continuing to kindle this light, especially in this moment where global and continental life feels dominated by relentless noise—small groups shouting loudly, distorted narratives, misinformation and disinformation, weaponising fear, and exhausting an already depleted populace. ‘If I say it enough times, it becomes true’ is the underlying strategy.

Yet in the face of such noise, she recalled something a senior colleague once said to her: ‘You must be as convicted about the rightness of your position as they are.’

This ‘rightness’ refers to a conviction in fundamental laws of human dignity and rights for all people. It is the conviction that Africa and Africans are not ‘developing’ or from the ‘third world’ but deserving of self-determination and the conditions that support human flourishing. It is the conviction that everyday African leadership—shown through the stories of each of our contributors—is worthy of the spotlight. That everyone deserves to be represented in leadership narratives. With this conviction, we don’t add to the noise; we nurture important signals.

The refusal to give up hope for a better future for Africa and Africans serves as creative resistance and transformation of the colonised mind. It is refusing to surrender moral imagination to those who operate from fear or exclusion of Africa and Africans in the global system. It is not self-righteousness. It is choosing to love all humanity over dehumanisation. This includes loving those who do not share such convictions (and who choose self/subgroup interests that subjugate Africa and her peoples on and off the continent), in service of a collectively flourishing world.

It is also a willingness to support African leaders to bridge to the future they imagine. Bridging here isn’t a passive form of acquiescence to the status quo that isn’t working for Africa and Africans. Rather, it is anchored in taking action to go from the world as it is to the world as it ought to be—a place where all of us prosper. Yabome concluded: ‘We cannot give up on the signals of hope. In retrospect, they will be the butterfly effect.’

The story of the future is being written every day—by governments, by media ecosystems, by polarised communities, by those fighting to maintain the status quo and those trying to break it apart. As Sarah reminded us: ‘For better or worse, the story will be written. The question is who holds the pen?’ We often invoke the role of the Griot in many African cultures and communities. Someone has to narrate the story so that we may properly honour it, be nourished by it. So that we may see ourselves as we are.

WWLA is claiming that role.

Not to sanitise or romanticise the moment, but to tell the truth with nuance, with hope, and with fidelity to our core belief: Africa’s futures are already emerging in its people.

We do not shy away from the hard parts. We name the despair, the corruption, the global power imbalances, the exhaustion of systems that have not yet transformed. But we also insist on narrating the signals of hope: the everyday leaders, the quiet innovations, the acts of courage that will someday be understood as part of the continent’s next great turning point when the history of this era is told. We may not be able to see the forest for the trees right now, but we will continue to be one of the platforms where the extraordinary impacts of everyday African leadership are uplifted. As Sarah reminded us, ‘where so many projects are about what we do, WWLA is also about reflecting on, learning from, looking at, interrogating, documenting, observing, narrating what’s happening. That is such an important part of keeping the leadership integrity. That must continue.’

After nearly a decade of gathering stories and learning from leaders across the continent, one thing is clear:

Leadership is not a role.
It is not a title.
It is a decision.

A decision to keep telling the truth.
A decision to keep loving the community you’re accountable to.
A decision to resist cynicism.
A decision to act—even in the smallest of ways—in alignment with the world you want to build.

As we concluded our conversation, Judith asked a powerful question: ‘What if there is no world that works for everyone?’

And yet, even in wrestling with that question, we returned to the importance of artefacts of joining such as music, poems, stories. These are artefacts of our shared humanity, that anchor those moments when people momentarily lay down their arms (literal or metaphorical) and remember they belong to one another.

WWLA is one such artefact.

A lighthouse.
A gathering place.
A memory keeper.
A container for possibility.
A love letter to the continent, and both its present and its futures.

What do you see for the future of WWLA?