Making Africa a Land of Opportunity
LEAD Africa held a conference in Hammamet, Tunisia on the 20th- 23rd November 2006 on the theme ‘Making Africa a Land of Opportunity’.
The conference is a visioning and agenda setting exercise with LEAD Fellows, affliated NGO partners, and advisory groups and institutions - all of whom are committed to fostering opportunity in Africa. The outcomes of the conference will feed into our pan-African policy agenda delivered through the LEAD national and regional associations.
LEAD Africa is a new umbrella organisation for our three existing regional programmes:
and LEAD Southern and Eastern Africa.
This is an exciting step forward for LEAD Africa, one that will allow it to create a pan-African network of leaders committed to sustainable and socially equitable development. This expansion of our network in Africa is happening in the midst of a new optimism about the future of the continent as well as real economic, social and political gains. It is critical that LEAD Africa contributes to building leadership capacity that can respond to the changing climate.
It is our vision that LEAD Africa will provide a civil society platform for dialogue and policy intervention beyond the level of the state, to inform continent-wide development initiatives and strategies and engage with bodies such as NEPAD, AU, the G8 and the Commission for Africa. At the same time it will serve as an institutional framework for the implementation of viable and concrete steps that will lead to change at the local level.
We would like to thank our partners ENDA TM, for their support, the African Development Bank for their advice and Canadian CIDA for their funding support.