Overview

The Kellogg Foundation’s investment in systems change is designed to strengthen leadership capacity, enhance leadership skills, promote productive life skills, and unify instruments at national and regional levels to support and ensure a self-drive mindset (particularly for youth, women, and families).  It is rooted in the appreciation of African culture, values, and norms, as informed by current reality and local circumstances. The southern Africa program builds on the use of local knowledge and resources while wisely borrowing ideas and technology from elsewhere. Likewise, because learning is a social and cultural process, the program gives priority to sharing best practices and lessons, scaling-up local successes and dialogues, and building solidarity of progressive forces in the region.

Although the vision for Africa’s future lies in the action of local communities and in their ability to act as agents in building their own development systems around their values, an essential ingredient for social and economic transformation remains with visionary leadership at national and regional levels. For example, leadership capacity at the national level holds the ability to inform the policy environment and to make wise public investments in rural and poor communities. At the same time, such leadership has to work with communities to create various capacities at the local level.

Kellogg’s program investments to strengthen leadership capacity at national and regional levels are made to:

• Identify, review, acknowledge, and incorporate Africa’s diverse sources of cultural heritage and leadership at the national and regional level into leadership training and development content, process, and tools, as appropriate.
• Identify and build leadership capacity and skills in all sectors at the regional and national level that are needed for supporting local development.
• Facilitate the continued alignment of government, business, and civil society on issues of national and regional importance with respect to development objectives and approaches for rural communities.
• Promote partnerships and networks that facilitate leadership innovation and development that relate to local improvement.
• Co-create with local, national, and regional partners, prototypes and knowledge development strategies which will be demonstrated in identified areas at the village level, referred to as zoom sites, and assessed for their effectiveness.
• Plan for a regional learning center that supports African rural communities in their effective development.

Priority is given to leadership development in the sectors and institutions most aligned with the program’s four levers of change, which are: 

• Civic responsibility: Building opportunities and capacity for public policy analysis and engagement, particularly for women and young people in civil society and business.
• Economic opportunity:  Upgrading capacity for business leadership, both at the business enterprise level, and the national and regional levels where investment, marketing, and trade skills are important.
• Skills and leadership: Economic, social, and life skills training to strengthen the capacity of the human infrastructure serving rural areas.
• Health and well-being: Greater engagement, learning by doing, and opportunities for innovative leadership on key challenges such as HIV/AIDS and orphaned and vulnerable children, as well as hunger and food insecurity.