Our Background

The genesis of Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Accountability for Development (or LEAD, in acronym) stemmed from the 44^th US President Barack Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). In 2014, the first 6 Rwandans were selected to participate in one of the YALI programs, the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders. The following cohort of Mandela Washington Fellows joins their predecessors to implement a Menstrual Hygiene Management project in four secondary schools across the country. This project and several other projects that followed strengthened the collaboration and built the relationship of the fellows. 

Rwanda YALI alumni’s eagerness to stay together and apply the training from YALI to impact their communities birthed the creation of LEAD, a growing non-profit making organization that currently brings together all alumni from Rwanda who participated and successfully completed distinguished programs of the United States Department of State for African Emerging Leaders.

The creation of LEAD creates more credibility, opens more windows of opportunities for collaboration and sustains the legacy of leadership. In 2017, a cross-section of Rwanda’s chapter of the YALI program came together and officially founded LEAD. A steering board was elected and a notarized statute was adopted.  

Current members of LEAD are presently carrying out the Rwanda Governance Board’s process of local non-government organization registration. This process has fostered a new vision of leadership to emerge with an ongoing plan of sustainability.