Over the past decade, hundreds of youth leadership initiatives have been established globally with the mission of grooming a new generation of leaders. This paper examines this largely unstudied and rapidly expanding leadership pipeline based on an ongoing study, which has collected data on 277 programmes that: target African youth, offer educational training or professional development, and have goals of cultivating leaders who will contribute to African development; and interviewed and surveyed 240 youth participants. Our purpose is twofold: (1) we offer an overview of the organisational approaches of these initiatives, which reveal a global ecosystem within and beyond Africa that is investing billions of dollars into youth leadership. Then, using case studies of the African Leadership Academy and University, and the Young African Leadership Initiative, (2) we ask what their tendency toward elite-driven strategies, corporate leadership models, and foreign collaboration may indicate about their larger politics and likely impact.

在过去的十年里，全球范围内已经建立了数百个青年领导力计划，其使命是培养新一代的领导者。本文基于一项正在进行的研究对这一很大程度上未经研究且迅速扩大的领导管道进行了检验，该研究收集了 277 个项目的数据，这些项目：针对非洲青年，提供教育培训或专业发展，目标是培养能够为非洲发展做出贡献的领导者；并采访和调查了 240 名青年参与者。我们的目的有两个：(1) 我们概述了这些举措的组织方法，揭示了非洲内外的全球生态系统，该生态系统正在向青年领导力投资数十亿美元。然后，利用非洲领导学院和大学的案例研究，