The African Leadership Impact Hub (ALIH) brings together universities, businesses, governments, development organizations, and institutional leaders to rethink how leadership is understood, developed, and embedded across Africa. Rather than focusing solely on developing individual leaders, ALIH adopts a systems-based approach, recognizing that effective leadership is shaped by organizational culture, institutions, governance structures, and the wider social context in which leaders operate.
Led by Loughborough University, in partnership with the Global Business School Network, ALIH advances co-created leadership solutions to strengthen organizations, institutions, and communities.
Why ALIH?
Leadership development continues to grow across Africa, yet many organizations face persistent leadership challenges, including declining employee engagement, high rates of leadership failure, intergenerational tensions within the workplace, and the need to build more inclusive leadership pipelines that create greater opportunities for women and young leaders. At the same time, many leadership programs are based on models developed in different cultural and institutional contexts, limiting their relevance and effectiveness.
ALIH responds to these challenges by developing evidence-based, culturally grounded leadership approaches that reflect the realities of African organizations and institutions. By bringing together academics, practitioners, policymakers, and organizational leaders, the Hub provides a collaborative platform to generate new knowledge, develop practical solutions, and strengthen leadership systems that deliver sustainable organizational and societal impact.
Strategic Pillars
Impact Leadership Development Principles. Map the evidence on how leadership systems function across different African institutional contexts and translate research insights into actionable design principles for context-valid leadership development systems.
African Leadership Diagnostic Toolkit. Develop a suite of scalable, evidence-based assessment and monitoring tools to help organizations strengthen their leadership systems and assess alignment across leader emergence, selection, and effectiveness.
Digital Leadership Knowledge Hub. Create an online platform to host leadership resources and enable opportunities for collaboration, research, policy engagement, and knowledge exchange.
Join ALIH
ALIH operates a multidisciplinary approach that ensures leadership solutions are informed by both research and real-world experience. Participation is invited from universities and business schools, government ministries and public institutions, private sector organizations, international development agencies, NGOs and civil society, leadership and organizational development specialists, and researchers and policy experts.
Connect
Become part of a growing pan-African leadership ecosystem. Collaborate across sectors and countries, grounded in a shared commitment to African leadership development.
Transform
Gain access to cutting-edge research and practical leadership tools, as well as network-level insights including benchmarking and scaling opportunities, data access, assessment instruments, and educational tools (e.g., cases, simulations).
Impact
Shape the design and future direction of ALIH. Contribute to systemic improvements in the selection, development, and performance of leaders across African contexts and sectors, with opportunities for visibility and thought leadership.
To learn more or get involved, please contact info@gbsn.org.
