My YALI experience3 mins read

I recently completed over 20 weeks of training as a YALI (West Africa Regional Leadership Centre, Accra) trainee and I will be sharing my experience in this post.

For those who don’t know, YALI is the Young African Leaders Initiative. It is an initiative of the government of the United States of America that was launched under the leadership of former president Barack Obama. The goal of YALI is to train young Africans to be the next generation of leaders that Africa needs.

The first time I really heard about YALI was in 2018 – a friend of mine had gotten selected for the on-site training in Ghana that year. Fast forward to 2019 and I decided to apply – I wrote the essays and answered all questions as best as I could.

I really thought I’d get in but sadly, I didn’t get in that year. However, I got the opportunity to participate in the CommonWealth100 program.

I somehow forgot all about YALI until a friend mentioned it to me again in early 2020. I was like, it’s worth a shot and so I shot my shot. Thankfully, I made it to the interview stage and eventually got selected to join the online cohort 15.

Normally, the first part of the training takes place in Accra (for West Africa. Other regions have their centers) but because of CoVID-19 and the lockdown, this cohort was online and local.

There are 3 different YALI tracks – Entrepreneurship, Public Policy and Management and Civic Society Management. Over the past few years, I have become more interested in understanding how decisions are made at the government level.

This interests me beyond just what the private sector does because overwhelming evidence shows that it is difficult for private companies to thrive in the presence of a harsh environment produced by terrible policies. This made the choice for my track easy – I chose public policy and management.

The YALI training program for all tracks comprises 3 different aspects: online lectures, mentorship, and an internship. The online lectures had videos and articles pertaining to the track a trainee selected. There were also had quizzes to test one’s knowledge after each module. There was also a group presentation to work on after completing the online course.

I really wanted a non-Nigerian to be in my group as meeting other West African was one of my motivating factors for applying to the program, however, I wasn’t lucky in that regard. In spite of that, I was able to relate well with my group members and come up with a good presentation as part of our group work. I also interacted with other cohort members as much as the online platform allowed for.

The mentorship aspect of YALI runs for 4 weeks. This was one of my best parts of the program because I had an awesome mentor – we discussed things I didn’t even know I needed. The YALI mentorship program is set up in a way that you can get to choose your own mentor.

If you have no potential person, you can request for YALI to help you find one. I think finding your own mentor may be a better option as it’s an opportunity to interact with someone you probably have always wanted to reach out to. The YALI platform provides good leverage as people are more inclined to respond to a call backed by YALI as opposed to a random person reaching out.

As I said, I really liked my mentorship month, I expounded more on it as well as mentorship as a whole in this post here.

The third part of the programme is an internship month or a community service project. I chose the internship aspect because I believed that it will have more impact on my career long-term and I also had a place I had always wanted to work in and so I decided to leverage the YALI platform to get there.

I am glad I chose this path as the internship month was a really enlightening one, enabling me to understand the inner workings of my career of interest. By this time, I was very fatigued though, working and running a training program at the same time isn’t so easy but I made it to the end.

In general, I am really grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this programme. There are various steps I have taken that I am not certain I would have taken (now).

I’ll like to note here that the program is very hands-off and as such participants have to be self-driven to benefit from it. Getting into the programme by itself without active participation and self motivation may not produce desirable results.

As I end the programme, I hope to keep acting on the lessons learnt in these past months as I advance my career and contribute towards building the Africa of our dreams.

Calls for new cohorts are made once or twice a year and you can find them on the YALI RLC website that is in your region. Here’s the link to the West African center: Accra Regional Leadership Center.

The application process is pretty straightforward, and I explained a bit of it earlier. One important point is to not feel intimidated or little because you feel you are not a ‘leader’. We all have it in us to be leaders and chances are that you have exhibited leadership traits, even without being in a leadership position.

I believe young Africans should take advantage of the opportunity to grow as leaders and also interact with other Africans.