by the We Will Lead Africa Founders
We Will Lead Africa (WWLA) 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: 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.
Since the beginning, we have seen the primary identity of all who join the WWLA movement as Griots—capturing, documenting, sharing, invoking, holding, reminding, and preserving our stories. And doing so to inspire continued leadership action towards building a more prosperous Africa.
We have always taken seriously the great proverb popularised by Chinua Achebe—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. To this end, it has been important to us to produce volumes that hold the stories and express the extraordinary impact of everyday Africans, so that we can see ourselves represented in books and on bookshelves everywhere.
When we first started, we imagined ourselves solely as documenters—collecting the stories of other leaders. However, as the journey unfolded, we began to see that the lessons we were learning were not only about those who shared their stories. They were also about us.
Here are six lessons we have gained over six volumes and eight years as founders and curators of WWLA:
1. We are all leaders
One of the clearest lessons from this journey is that leadership is not a title—it’s an identity.
When WWLA started, we saw ourselves as facilitators or observers. But through storytelling, curation, and community, we realised something profound: We are leaders too.
Creating the platform that uplifts, the volumes that hold the stories, the spaces that allow others to see themselves as leaders, is also a form of service leadership. We are not centre stage, but we are ensuring the stage exists! And our kind of leadership doesn’t thrive in isolation. It flourishes in partnership—duos, trios, collectives. Every success WWLA has achieved has been born from shared energy, trust, and collaboration.
This aligns with the ‘We’ in WWLA: the power of our collective leadership, a leadership that listens, includes, and grows stronger through and with others.
2. The power of intentionality
So much of WWLA’s story has been about the power of intentionality. In fact, the WWLA inception story is rooted in the commitment that we three co-founders made to each other and our love of storytelling when we first met.
We’ve all attended conferences filled with brilliant people and beautiful connections, only for those relationships to fade away with no follow-up or follow-through. But with WWLA, something different happened. Our shared intentions created something that endured.
It wasn’t long after our first meeting that we were on a Zoom call, sharing our dreams, aspirations, and motivations with each other. Intentionally cultivating our bond, with our passion for African leadership at its core. It didn’t take a grand plan or any funding. It took the alchemy of timing, purpose, and willingness to act together.
Instead of simply talking about the lack of accessible African leadership stories, we decided to build the space where those stories could live and multiply. Where intentionality and action meet is where the transformation happens.
3. Timing and the energy of ideas
While some ideas demand hard work and persistence, others unfold naturally because their time has come. WWLA was one of those ideas.
There’s power in recognising when an idea’s moment has arrived. When it does, momentum builds effortlessly. The right people show up. The right doors open. Part of leadership, we’ve learned, is listening—to timing, to readiness, and to the quiet signs that say, now is the moment.
4. The courage and community to create
Every book, every story, every gathering has taught us the same lesson: there is power in the act of creating and doing, and doing so alongside others.
The practice of creating—of moving from conversation to creative insight, to clarity and action—is a leadership form of its own. Having the courage to follow what emerges when you follow the creative spark has an energy that unblocks, and doing it in community keeps you moving forward with accountability. This was the reminder and key lesson from our second edition of the WWLA Griot Masterclass, a 12-week leadership storytelling and story-writing workshop. The stories produced by the cohort of leaders who completed the masterclasss are part of our fourth WWLA volume: Courage, Community, Creativity. In our reflections from walking alongside this cohort, we wrote the following about courage and creativity in community:
Courage: Courage literally means the ability to do something in the face of fear, doubt and seemingly impossible circumstances. When often faced with challenges, it is stories of others who have walked the road of courage before us that spurs us on.
Community: Community is foundation. It fuels not just villages and towns, but ecosystems for innovation, comrades in love, and talent for a new revolution. It allows us to be, now more than ever, connected in power and solidarity across spaces, places, and platforms.
Creativity: What this Griot volume shows us is how we might spark and inspire a kind of creativity that is life-affirming, how we might point it at challenges and injustices in service of a more wholesome beauty, and how we might relate to creativity in ways that lead us towards the prosperous Africa that all the world deserves.
5. Disrupting the status quo
One of the hardest but most important realisations has been this: the systems we exist in are not designed to sustain this kind of work. It doesn’t serve the status quo to amplify narratives of everyday African power and self-determination. And yet, that is exactly what WWLA has chosen to do.
Every story we publish, every conversation we spark, is an act of quiet resistance—a refusal to let external definitions of worth determine the future of African leadership.
6. Ubuntu, lived
Ultimately, WWLA has taught us that Ubuntu is not just an idea—it’s a daily practice. Each WWLA volume, each launch, each connection represents Ubuntu in motion, a living expression of the truth that ‘I am because we are.’
As Judith said in our recent conversation:
Like a stool with three legs, all the legs must be complete for it to stand.
This is the world we are building—one that stands because it is whole, shared, and interconnected.
The WWLA journey so far has been a tapestry woven from intention, courage, timing, and collective spirit.
It has shown us that leadership is everywhere: in the quiet persistence of doers, in the shared dreams of collaborators, and in the communities that form when we say yes to possibility.
The story is still being written, but one thing is clear: we will lead—and we already are.