This African University Is Reclaiming Conservation for Africans
Rapidly expanding with students and campuses, African Leadership University wants environmental stewardship at the local level.
The campus of African Leadership University in Mauritius.
Photographer: Nicolas Michael Malachie
Fred Swaniker, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant and Stanford business grad, isn’t your conventional eco-warrior. But he’s radically reshaping the strategy to preserve Africa’s wild expanses through his African Leadership University, where the curriculum’s key tenets include environmental investment and conservation as business.
His rapidly growing for-profit schools have 2,000 students at campuses in Rwanda and Mauritius and co-working spaces in Johannesburg and Nairobi, Kenya. After raising $30 million in a Series B round led by Danish retail billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, Ghana-born Swaniker will open a flagship in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, in September that will bring the student body to 5,000. Two new microcampuses, called ALX, also will open next year in Lagos, Nigeria, and Casablanca, Morocco.