When I heard that I had been selected for the Mandela Washington Young African Leaders Initiative and would be at the Presidential Precinct, I was excited. It couldn’t have come at a better time as I was just about to kick-start a project dear to my heart and needed time to concentrate on it and also have experts guide me.

It had been a busy year for me. Working six days a week as the editor of Sunday Punch, Nigeria’s most widely circulated newspaper, six weeks in the United States of America sounded heavenly.

As I sat on my connecting flight to Virginia, I went through the faces of my classmates and the faculty that the Presidential Precinct had earlier sent to fellows. “I hope they are cool people,” I mused.

It turns out they were cool and so much more. Any time I’m asked to talk about my experiences, I feel they cannot be summarised in a few words. It’s almost impossible to compress the experiences of six institutions, lectures from over 100 teachers and adventures with 21 other fellows in a few lines. I could write a book about it.

During the fellowship, one of my “aha” moments was when I met Anne Ellis, vice president of global initiatives, at ArchTam. The first time I saw Anne was at Montpelier when ArchTam Senior Vice President and Director of Global Program Management Timothy McManus was discussing development economics and infrastructure financing. Anne listened intensely and when any fellow asked her questions, she knew the person’s ‎background and history. She had spent time reading our biographies.

As the first female and youngest editor ‎of Punch Newspaper, which is over 40 years old, I’m always eager to learn from women who have broken barriers in their industries. Always offering encouraging words to the fellows, Anne epitomised the ideals of exemplary leadership that we were taught. While talking about why ArchTam was the major sponsor of the fellowship at the Presidential Precinct, she said the Fortune 500 company believed in Africa’s future leaders.

In class, Timothy left no doubt in our minds that ArchTam knows its business as he kept reeling out economic figures and projections about Nigeria and the countries of other fellows.

While Tim kept harping on the need for efficient infrastructural planning and the merits of public-private partnerships, he opened my eyes to the enormous possibilities in my country due to its size and population and the need to effectively plan for the future by putting the right infrastructure in place.

Joe Wambia, ArchTam managing director for finance, global programs and Africa, was, however, the first ArchTam executive we met. ‎He was with the fellows at the Presidential Precinct right from the beginning. Joe spoke about economics and trade from Asia to Africa.

As I write this, I can hear Joe’s voice in class saying: “This will be an interactive class. Everyone should be involved. ‎You are going to be teaching me.” I remember when he got us talking about “bottom-up and bottom-down” development styles and divided the class into two groups: pro-bottom down and pro-bottom up. At the end, we realised that there was no one answer to economic development.

At the centre of the sessions with ArchTam’s executives was the topic of sustainability. According to Gary Lawrence, ArchTam vice president and chief sustainability officer, any project or endeavour that does not factor in all aspects of sustainability may not succeed. Giving practical examples, Gary said the cultural, economic, political, technological and environmental dimensions must not be ignored.

Practising what it preaches, ArchTam kept in touch with the fellows when we left Virginia and invited some of us to its Washington, D.C., office, where we met some members of the ArchTam family and shared our experiences with them.

I got home to receive messages from ArchTam executives telling me that they were a phone call or an email away should I need their help in any way.

There was no better way to demonstrate the company’s commitment to Africa, its future, its people and its leaders.

Oluwatoyosi Ogunseye is the first female editor in the 40-plus-year history of Punch Newspaper, Nigeria’s most widely read newspaper. The recipient of 30 local and international awards, she is presently working on a leadership curriculum for primary and secondary schools in Nigeria.
LinkedIn: Toyosi Ogunseye

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This July Fourth, I was pleased to represent ArchTam at the naturalization ceremony held at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s hilltop home in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Fellows of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) were special guests at this quintessential American holiday event, when citizens come to observe and celebrate the making of new citizens that have come to the U.S. from around the globe. I attended the event to meet with several of the Fellows from Uganda, Tanzania and South Africa, where ArchTam is about to begin a sustainability planning project for the World Bank that will promote green urban development practices in Africa’s cities.

The Fourth of July provided a holiday break from the Fellows’ very intensive study program. They had already spent some weeks on the historic campus of the University of Virginia learning about American government and commerce from academic scholars, government representatives, and some of ArchTam’s own practice leaders.

And Monticello, home of the author of our Declaration of Independence, provided a most fitting venue to the Fellows to be introduced to the holiday and to our naturalization ceremony. As is done at Monticello every year, a bell is tolled, the large audience finally settles into silence and then Justice John Charles Thomas, the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, reads the Declaration of Independence in a solemn yet triumphant voice. Justice Thomas’ powerful representation can remind even the most jaded what we gather to honor and celebrate on this day.

David M. Rubenstein, co-Founder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group and a major philanthropist, gave the keynote address prior to the swearing in of new citizens. As many of the speakers have done over the years, Mr. Rubenstein spoke about America as the country of immigrants and all the benefits that generations of immigrants have received.  He stressed to the new citizens:

“But it is we, the current citizens of this country, who should be grateful to you; it is we who are privileged to have you as fellow citizens; and it is we who are honored that you have chosen our country to bring your own talents, your own ambitions, your own dreams, and your own lives.”

After the ceremony, the celebration continued with a picnic on Montalto, the hilltop that overlooks Monticello. There, the Fellows were treated to a barbeque, hot dogs, root beer floats, live country music — and later in the day, fireworks. I had the opportunity to speak with a number of the Fellows. I heard over and over again how impressed they were by the structure and substance of the program that was offered by the Presidential Precinct, how interested they were to learn about professional business practices, and how pleased they would be to have the opportunity to engage with ArchTam in the future.

It was delightful to witness their enthusiasm and to hear their impressions of America. It was inspiring to hear about the programs they represent, their passion for what they do, and their thoughts about how they might begin to implement what they’ve learned as Fellows. I was so pleased to experience this special day and so proud that ArchTam had supported this initiative.

Diane Dale, FASLA, JD, (Diane.Dale@archtam.com) is vice president and director of sustainability planning in ArchTam’s buildings + places business line. With more than 30 years of experience planning new communities around the globe, her portfolio represents a continuum of advancements and innovation that are models of sustainable planning and development.
LinkedIn: Diane Dale

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In Uganda, I manage a project on extractives governance that seeks to create opportunities for communities in mining and oil bearing areas to allow them to claim some sustainable benefits from the sector. The project also provides information to the public on the sector, to empower them to hold the government and extractive companies accountable.

With this sort of background, I came to America with the ambition of linking up with fellow governance activists to learn how I could deepen my work and make it more impactful. Little did I know that the most important learnings I would later receive would not even be from civil society types, but top executives of a Fortune 500 company I must confess I had never heard of — ArchTam!

Before any ArchTam staff set foot in our class, we had been introduced to an alien topic, but one that kept ringing in my head up to this day: Design Thinking. I got obsessed with the five-step design thinking process, i.e., Emphathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

I sadly realised that I had somehow managed to go through many projects in the course of my 14-year working life without systematically thinking through my planning processes, and couldn’t help thinking about how differently and better I could have done some things. Like my colleagues, I wondered how I could now deploy Design Thinking to become a more efficient manager.

But when Gary Lawrence, ArchTam’S VP and Chief Sustainability Officer delivered a lecture on sustainability, particularly the political, cultural, technological and environmental aspects of it as well as what role leaders can play in harmonising this mix, it all started to fall in line.

Then came Timothy McManus’ talk on the economics of development and infrastructure financing that finally sealed it. Just being able to learn about delivering excellence from ArchTam’s Senior VP and Director of Global Program Management was an awesome experience considering that, well, the company has actually delivered excellence for a long time.

Like Gary, he too emphasised the role of proper planning in the development and implementation of huge infrastructural projects. ‘Tim’, like we called him in class, mesmerised us with projections about the future of Africa’s population, state of infrastructure and growth trends that we, Africans, had never been exposed to. He demonstrated why ArchTam is likely to remain in business for a long time to come because the world’s population is generally getting bigger and bigger, creating demand for better planned social infrastructure projects.

These lectures got me reflecting about my own work back home in Uganda. Being in the business of informing the public on development issues even beyond the extractives sector, I felt a little guilty for those few times I may have been unfair to my fellow citizens by publishing articles that lacked depth in analysis.

By listening to Tim and Gary, I learnt that rushing into projects without the proper planning is tantamount to suicide. I also learnt that sustainability, no matter the cost, has to be a key consideration in any project. Many times, I have accused the government of being slow on getting infrastructural projects completed but I now realise why that may have been.

Joe Wambia too, ArchTam’s Managing Director for Finance, Global Programs and Africa, was a regular visitor to the programme and became a sort of mentor to many of the Fellows. He later chaired a panel discussion on development paradigms that got the whole class polarised on the “bottom-up” and “top-down” development paradigms. “I want you to be able to have an intelligent discussion about these issues back home,” he repeatedly urged us.

Now I am back home, in my own ‘reality’, like we used to say, ruminating about those wonderful times. I feel more learned and able to have an “intelligent” discussion on the development future of my country and continent, one in which I will argue that mega-projects are important for the developing world, but their design should incorporate sustainability, thanks to ArchTam and the Presidential Precinct.

Byaruhanga Chris (Chris.Musiime@actionaid.org) has spearheaded an Extractives Governance Project at ActionAid Uganda, an anti-poverty non-governmental organisation, for three years, and manages the Oil in Uganda website and newsletter. Upon returning home from YALI, Chris has been working to mobilise local communities in oil-producing areas to defend their rights to land and property, and to improve their access to opportunities available in the oil and gas sector.
Twitter: @MusiimeChris

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What impressed me most was that these young people were beyond smart. At very young ages, they were also very wise. And as they engaged in bettering the institutions and communities in their home nations, they were very brave as well. It is amazing and heartening to hear them describe their initiatives, the setbacks that come with any societal innovation and changing conventional wisdom, and the vigor with which they found ways to bypass barriers and make ever more progress.

Like every continent, there are significant challenges in Africa related to health care, governance, tribalism and nostalgic impulses that create more difficulties than they resolve.

With regard to sustainability specifically, we conversed about a number of details within the context of three so sets of ideas:

• We too often allow ourselves to focus only on the attributes of problems rather than fundamentals. An example, one growing in import, is the need to address water, food, energy and civility as a nexus rather than a set of discrete ideas. One can make progress addressing water supply alone but the value proposition for any solution increases as one tries to find solutions at the intersections of these issues.
• We then talked about what I describe as “the rule of three.” That is, no sustainability problem at scale can be effectively addressed unless the solution is technically feasible, economically viable and politically acceptable. These issues are in constant flux and as one changes others, become more or less viable. A deep focus on sustainability will be constantly looking to the balance of these three elements and trying to maximize the benefits of each.
• And, the third thing we discussed were the various kinds of capital that need to be taken into account in sustainability. They are financial, natural, social and human. In one way, the YALI meeting focused on this last attribute of capital — human intellectual capacity, which is the only natural resource on the planet that is improved by use rather than diminished in use.

After spending a couple of days with these amazing young people, any doubts I had about their ability to borrow the best ideas from around the world and make them African ideas that fit within their culture for the betterment of everyone was certainly resolved.

I’m not sure what I did for them. But, they certainly empowered and energized me to work ever harder at making progress toward a better world.

Gary Lawrence is vice president and chief sustainability officer at ArchTam.
Twitter: @CSO_ArchTam

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ArchTam made a bold demonstration of support of Africa’s young leaders. ArchTam donated nearly US$300,000 to support the development and execution of the Presidential Precinct’s Academic and Leadership Program for 25 Mandela Washington Fellows of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) — a signature effort by President Obama’s administration to help guide Africa’s most promising young leaders. In addition to the financial support, ArchTam executives and clients participated in the delivery of the Fellow’s six week Academic and Leadership Program.

I partnered with Joe Wambia, Managing Director, Finance, Global Programs & Africa, in leading the company’s engagement in the program. Throughout, ArchTam clients and executives shared their knowledge on a variety of topics including sustainability, infrastructure financing, program management, geographic information systems, and international development models. The Fellows were inspired and enlightened by the international dialogue, critical thinking, and collaborative problem solving skills demonstrated by ArchTam executives Gary Lawrence, Tim McManus, Kevin Carlson, Zsolt Nagy, Maryna Storie, David Wall, and Joe Wambia. The Fellows were impressed with ArchTam’s understanding of the challenges on the continent as well as the company’s ability to help their clients address these challenges. Every session was punctuated by engaging dialogue as the Fellows internalized the lessons and delighted in the opportunity to expand their personal networks with ArchTam executives and clients.

Equally, the ArchTam executives and clients were inspired and enlightened by the Fellows. During a visit to the program, I sat at dinner with three Fellows, each already extraordinarily successful in business and/or politics and with significant name recognition in their home country. Each of the three Fellows shared aspirations to make a real difference and become president of their country. They shared means of spurring growth and prosperity, strengthening democratic governance, and enhancing peace and security. As the conversation progressed, each Fellow shared detailed plans that were well into implementation. These were not young people daydreaming. These were young leaders working hard to fulfill aspirations for themselves and their country.

One of many inspiring and enlightening moments, this conversation helped me understand the significance of the Mandela Washington Fellowship Program and appreciate ArchTam’s strategic leadership.

Fortunately, the relationship does not end with the closing of the program. The Fellows often stated there is a bond that comes from sharing, the spirit of Ubuntu. And we agree. With the help of Jim Dray, ArchTam Corporate VP – Business Technology Solutions, and his team, the Presidential Precinct leadership developed a vision of a digital platform that allows Fellows, ArchTam, government and business leaders, and other participants to continue these engagement efforts for years to come. The Presidential Precinct Network powered by Socialcast is growing into a thriving online community.

ArchTam’s financial commitment made this program possible. And the engagement by ArchTam employees and clients with the spirit of Ubuntu enriched the program. This partnership gives yet another reason for us to say that we’re proud to be ArchTam employees.

Anne Ellis (Anne.Ellis@archtam.com) is vice president of global initiatives at ArchTam, and has been with the company for more than 13 years.

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