Fred Swaniker ’98 has founded an elite new residential secondary school in South Africa that is molding leaders for Africa’s future.

The African Leadership academy (ALA) on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, is already harder to get into than Harvard, and it just opened its doors last fall. The first class, made up of 97 secondary school students from 29 countries, is full of energetic and entrepreneurial types from throughout the continent.

Take, for example, William Kamkwamba of Malawi, who built a windmill to provide electricity for his family’s home. Or Belinda Munemo of Zimbabwe, who built an agricultural business to create ongoing income for an orphaned family. Then there’s Ethiopian Dawit Bekele Mekonnen, who proposed a restructuring of the Addis Ababa public transportation system. With students such as these, and driven and dedicated founder Fred Swaniker ’98, the ALA seems destined to play a significant role in an exhilarating new era in Africa.

Just a few years ago, with an MBA from Stanford, Swaniker was working as a consultant with McKinsey & Company in South Africa. He was poised to live the kind of life that dreams are made of. But Swaniker had another dream he couldn’t turn his back on: founding a two-year, coeducational boarding school for Africans of every country, one that would develop leaders and entrepreneurs with twin passions for Africa and public service.

On the ALA Web site, he explains, “I kept asking myself this question: ‘What will it take to make Africa prosper?’” He looked at prosperous societies and realized “people in those societies had developed important new ideas—some of them simple, some of them revolutionary— and implemented these ideas.”

Swaniker is uniquely qualified to launch a school with lofty, pan-African goals. Several generations of his family have been involved in founding schools in Africa. He helped launch a top private elementary school in Botswana and the leadership development program Global Leadership Adventures, with campuses in Ghana, South Africa, India, Brazil, and Costa Rica. He has lived in Ghana, the Gambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Nigeria.

But there was the little matter of the $124,000 that McKinsey had advanced for Swaniker’s MBA, on the condition that he return to the firm after Stanford. Swaniker tried to hire someone to start the school he envisioned, but in October 2004 he wound up quitting McKinsey and committed to reimbursing them for the tuition. “I realized that I couldn’t outsource my dream,” he says. Apparently there were no hard feelings: two managers from McKinsey became his first backers.

There have been many more since, including Cisco Systems, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and a host of other companies, foundations, and individuals, making it possible for Swaniker to buy and renovate a former printing college in Gauteng Province, home to Johannesburg and Pretoria, a cosmopolitan hub that places the school near plenty of mentors and guest speakers. The school will assist its graduating students in applying to top colleges and universities anywhere in the world.

At minimum, half of ALA’s students will pay nothing to attend (in its first year, this number is closer to 80 percent). But this isn’t a grant—it’s a “forgivable loan.” When graduates turn 25, ALA will contact them. If they are working in Africa and plan to do so for at least 10 more years, their debt will be waived. If they are working anywhere but Africa, they will owe tuition plus accrued interest.

Swaniker is serious about this unconventional tuition plan. He sees it as a way to start overcoming Africa’s colonial legacy, as expressed in a popular preference for “safe” civil service jobs. “Africa won’t come out of poverty unless we become entrepreneurs,” he told Forbes magazine for a recent article about ALA. “We want their talents back in Africa.

“Over the next 50 years, African Leadership Academy will develop 6,000 leaders for Africa,” says Swaniker. “Entrepreneurial and ethical leaders who will launch large-scale enterprises that can eradicate poverty, who will establish innovative non-profit organizations that address Africa’s most pressing social and environmental challenges, and who will enable governments to make effective policies that will facilitate economic growth, public health, and political stability. Simply put, this academy aims to transform Africa.”

Jan Shaw-Flamm ’76 is a regular contributor to Macalester Today.r.