Umar Kawu: Facilitating Capacity Building for Leadership in Africa

Umar is a fellow of LEAD Cohort 10 from Nigeria. He is a Leadership and Management Consultant/Trainer, with a passion for building and enabling people to be the best they want to be.

Following an invitation on the LEAD website in 2004 to Associates and Fellows, he applied and was selected as facilitator to the British Council InterAction Leadership Programme, which was designed in partnership with a United Kingdom based consulting firm and LEAD, represented by Gillian Martin Mehers, former Director of Capacity Development.

To date Umar has remained a member of the InterAction facilitation team, the programme is currently training the fourth cohort of leaders. InterAction supports emerging African leaders as they face up to the challenges of the 21st century by enabling them to find innovative solutions to the challenges they face in their leadership journey. The programme runs in four modules, three out of the four modules are conducted in the respective countries, while the fourth module holds in 2 or 3 African countries as a Pan African Event with all participants attending one of the events.

Because of the progress recorded in the 19 African countries* where over 1000 participants are completing the journey the programme has been introduced in the United Kingdom and Pakistan. InterAction sessions were also organized at the Peoples Forum during the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) that held in Uganda in November 2007. For more information on InterAction please visit www.bc-interaction.org

(* Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mauritius, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda ,Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan)

Release date: Monday, December 10, 2007