African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development
African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development
The African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development (Centre LSD) is a leading national NGO and think tank in Nigeria registered to build strategic leadership for sustainable development in Africa. The Centre’s mission is to work with forces of positive change to empower citizens to transform society The Centre carries out its programmes through research, capacity building, advocacy and campaigns built on the principles of catalytic partnership and rights-based approach. Youth, Women’s rights and disability issues are mainstreamed in our programming. The Centre’s work is built and organized around three pillars: Leadership, Strategy and Development.
Centre LSD runs three leadership training progammes namely leadership school which runs for one year; Leadership Institute (one-week intensive programme) for middle level managers and Executive Leadership Course (one week intensive programme) for Chief Executives. The leadership training programmes focus on both leader development (expanding the capacity of individuals for effective leadership roles and processes) and leadership development (expansion of organizations’ capacity to enact basic leadership tasks including setting direction, creating alignment and maintaining commitment). Over eight hundred professionals have graduated from the Centre LSD leadership programmes.
Centre LSD has worked extensively on issues of appropriate strategy. It has engaged issues of strategy including national development strategies (National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) and Vision 20:2020); Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); Africa Agenda 2063; sectoral strategies and strategy for the development of the Niger Delta through policy dialogue series, policy briefs and media advocacy. The staff of the Centre have supported several organizations to develop strategy including developing a 4 year strategic plan for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (now UN Women); WaterAid Nigeria Strategy (2011-2015); ActionAid Nigeria Partnership Against Poverty Strategy; National Coalition on Women and AIDS (NAWOCA) 6 year strategic plan (2010-2016) and Ekiti State Development Strategy (2011-2015), the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) (2012-2016 and 2017-2021), the National Orientation Agency (NOA) etc
Centre LSD implements development programmes across Nigeria from community level and state to national and international levels with the strategy of maintaining local-national-international linkage. The Centre’s governance programmes are conceptualized to improve transparency and accountability and increasing citizens’ participation in governance especially in budget formulation and implementation. The Centre implements projects on enhancing citizens’ participation in budgetary process in Bayelsa and Delta States. Specifically, the Centre’s Budget advocacy project was conceptualized to increase the capacity of CSOs for effective engagement with the Bayelsa State Government through budget advocacy for participatory and right based budgeting. The focus was to analyze previous Bayelsa State budgets, develop policy/advocacy briefs from identified gaps. The documents was then used to engage policy makers. The project also built the capacity of legislators, legislative staff and CSOs on budget analysis, participatory budgeting, rights-based budgeting as well as effective budgetary oversight.
The Centre engages the electoral process with a view to promoting credible, free and fair elections. This is done through providing technical assistance to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and supporting INEC for a visionary strategy to conduct credible, free and fair elections. In addition, the Centre monitors the electoral process and observes elections. In the past, the Centre observed elections conducted in Anambra State, Delta State and across the country in 2010 and the 2011 general elections. The Centre also observed the staggered elections in Sokoto State, Kogi State, Adamawa State, Bayelsa State, Cross River State, Edo State and Ondo State in 2012, the 2015 general elections and the just concluded 2019 elections.
The Centre’s environment programme is focused on environmental health and climate change. The strategy is to promote community participation in environmental health through Community Led Total Sanitation (CTLS) and increase community’s capacity for adaptation to the vagaries of climate change
Since January, 2010, Centre LSD has been organizing policy dialogue series to examine the content of public policies and institutions that formulate and implement them with a view to examining the implementation and impact of the policies. More importantly, the policy dialogue is not only diagnostic of the policy problems but also suggest alternative approaches to dealing with the problems. Issues that have been dealt with include Political Succession, Development Strategy and Management of Public Enterprises. Proceedings from the Policy dialogue series have been published into books.