By Dr Nizar Chaari — Founder of EPIK Leaders | DBA Candidate, EDEMIA
The African Union’s Agenda 2063 promises an integrated, prosperous continent in thirty-seven years. The decision-makers who signed it never specified how many trained leaders would be needed to get there. Nobody asked, either.
That silence is not an oversight. It reveals a dead end. The continent has resources, youth, energy. What it lacks is the capacity to systematically produce the people capable of mobilizing them. Training one hundred brilliant leaders in an artisanal manner is not enough for an Africa of 2.5 billion inhabitants in 2063. Tens of thousands will be needed.
The question is not whether Africa can train its leaders. The question is whether it can do so at scale.
The artisanal model has run its course
African leadership programs suffer from three structural flaws. First, they are built around charismatic, non-replicable figures — the program fades or weakens when the founder leaves. Second, they are modeled on North American or European frameworks that ignore communal values, the relationship to authority, and the relational logics specific to African societies. Third, they have no tools for measuring competencies. Evaluation rests on the trainer’s intuition.
“We don’t train leaders there. We hope they will emerge.”
This model has a logic: it reflects a tradition in which the leader reveals themselves through trial, not in a training room. But against the ambitions of Agenda 2063, this logic no longer holds. A talented artisan does not replace a production line.
Can we industrialize leadership without betraying Ubuntu?
Management science research offers a path. Boyatzis’s work (1982, 2008) on managerial competencies shows that a leader’s decision-making abilities can be broken down into observable, measurable, and teachable units. This is not an industrial metaphor. It is pedagogical engineering.
Combined with psychometric tools (DISC, Big Five, MBTI), this approach allows individual profiles to be mapped at scale and training pathways to be adapted without being standardized. And Goleman’s emotional intelligence — grounded in the work of Salovey and Mayer — integrates the relational and ethical dimension that these frameworks alone risk erasing.
In other words: training large numbers of leaders is not contradictory with training authentic leaders, provided that decision-making competencies are treated as modular, measurable, and teachable units.
This is where the question becomes uncomfortable: can we Taylorize leadership without killing Ubuntu? Without erasing that deep sense of community, solidarity, and collective responsibility that structures African societies?
What the model does not yet resolve
Standardization has a cost. It risks producing leaders who conform to a template, at the expense of the singular styles that Africa’s complexity demands. A decision-making competency framework can be universal in its structure and blind in its cultural assumptions.
More concretely: the Big Five and MBTI were designed and validated in Western contexts. Their relevance in sub-Saharan Africa or North Africa has not been rigorously established. Using them without adaptation means importing a cultural problem into the very device meant to correct it.
These limits do not disqualify the model. They define the conditions of its validity. A theoretical framework that acknowledges its blind spots is more reliable than a program that ignores them.
A first testing ground
EPIK Leaders, founded in Morocco in January 2025, is the first ground on which this model is being tested. The network now counts 100 clubs in Morocco and ambassadors in 34 African countries. This is not a reference point: it is a starting observation.
The empirical data that will confirm or refute the theoretical model will be available by 2027. Until then, the question remains open: do the decision-making competencies of a young leader trained in an African context develop better with a structured framework than with free experience? The field, not theory, will decide.
A question for decision-makers
International donors fund education programs. African universities train lawyers, engineers, economists. Governments invest in infrastructure.
How many of them fund research on endogenous African leadership? How many support the development of psychometric tools validated in African contexts? How many have asked how many trained leaders will be needed by 2063?
If universities, political decision-makers, and donors do not invest in this research, no one will. And in 2063, Africa will have a vision. It still will not have the leaders to carry it forward.
