Wits School of Governance programme calls on governments to
reshape the continent’s transformation ambition, writes George Morara
African governments have been told the phrase “Harnessing the continent’s demographic dividend” is long overdue.
Instead, they are being challenged to rethink—as a matter of urgency—how to utilise the bulging market-ready youth population to accelerate the continent’s transformation ambition, which is believed to be more than ready for deployment.
However, this cannot happen if governments fail to reorganise institutional operations, design, and implement working policies.
The African Union Development Agency–NEPAD (AUDA-NEPAD) leadership feels that the continent is at an extraordinary demographic position to achieve its transformational desire with 60% of the population under the age of 25, entering the labour market each year.
“This demographic dividend is a major opportunity for growth, but it heightens the urgency for effective policies, strong institutions, and leadership that can unlock our economic potential,” AUDA-NEPAD Chief Executive, Nardos Bekele-Thomas told a gathering in Johannesburg, South Africa during the launch of an Executive Management Programme on Public Sector Innovation and Transformation for Sustainable Development.
The launch, which saw the AUDA-NEPAD pen a deal with the Wits School of Governance, paved the way for a week-long intensive initiative—bringing together some of Africa’s most senior public servants, diplomats, and policymakers. The programme is aimed at accelerating institutional transformation with major ingredients to deliver on Agenda 2063, the continent’s blueprint and master plan for transforming Africa into the global powerhouse of the future.
Data shows that more than 10 million young Africans below the age of 25 enter the labour market annually. It is projected the continent will contribute a share of nearly one quarter of the world’s working-age population by 2050.
“From rapid technological change and shifting geopolitics to climate pressures and evolving global economic systems, governments must rethink how institutions operate and how policies are designed and implemented,” she told participants, emphasizing that for Africa, these shifts bring challenges that must be confronted by the right human capacity and opportunities that can be utilised to realise this dream.
In a continent where the ambition for transformation has long outpaced the capacity to deliver it, Bekele-Thomas believes that the new programme—whose singular aim is to close that gap—is more than just a ceremonial beginning, but a decisive investment in the continent’s most critical and often under-resourced asset: capable, forward-looking public institutions.
Bekele-Thomas noted that the programme, which sits within AUDA-NEPAD’s broader Energize Africa initiative, comes at a moment of heightened difficulties for African governments.
“Rapid technological change, shifting geopolitical alignments, the accelerating consequences of climate change, and a reconfiguring global economy are placing unprecedented demands on public institutions,” she said, noting that the launch, was direct about what this moment requires.
The programme is designed to strengthen public sector leadership and institutional performance across the continent. In articulating the rationale for the programme, Bekele-Thomas diagnosed Africa’s development challenge, noting that the problem is not the quality of the continent’s aspirations, but the gap between those aspirations and their implementation.
“The real challenge lies in implementation. Development frameworks must move beyond declarations to deliver measurable improvements in citizens’ lives,” she said, arguing that the successful realisation of Agenda 2063 depends on institutions that translate ambition into tangible results.
Bekele-Thomas further argued that institutions do not transform themselves, but change requires leadership, skills, and new ways of thinking.
Over the course of the week, participants engaged with leading scholars, practitioners, and policy experts on a curriculum that reflects the breadth of Africa’s development agenda. Topics included global health systems, public sector reform, development financing, institutional development, and the transformative potential of digital technologies and artificial intelligence.
World Bank statistics indicate that the digital economy could add over $180 billion to Africa’s GDP, reinforcing the trust that the digital dimension of the programme is particularly timely.
Harnessing that potential, however, requires more than connectivity and demands that institutions with the agility to adapt, and leadership capable of designing responsible policy frameworks that ensure new technologies serve inclusive and sustainable development.
The programme is also explicitly designed as a space for peer exchange, with Bekele-Thomas highlighting the value of bringing senior leaders together across national boundaries to reflect, share experiences, and build the relationships that underpin effective collaboration across the AU system.
“In our continent, we have no shortage of talent. We have no shortage of ambition,” she added.
The partnership with the Wits School of Governance brings academic accuracy and institutional credibility to the programme.
The programme also received the endorsement of the South African government, with acknowledgement extended to Minister Maropene Ramokgopa for her leadership on governance and public sector performance.
For Wits School of Governance, the collaboration represents an extension of its continental footprint and an affirmation of the university’s role in shaping the policy and governance landscape of the African Union. For AUDA-NEPAD, it marks a deepening of its investment in human capital as a driver of institutional transformation.
The ultimate benchmark against which this programme will be measured is Agenda 2063—the African Union’s fifty-year blueprint for the continent’s structural transformation.
“Together, let us strengthen leadership, build resilient institutions, and advance governance systems that drive Africa’s transformation and deliver on Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want,” Bekele-Thomas concluded.
This article originally appeared on The People Tribune’s website and is published with permission.
George Morara is a writer for The People Tribune.
Africa in Focus
Statistics indicate that the digital economy could add over $180 billion to Africa’s GDP
Africa in Focus
Perhaps most significantly, she led the consultative design and negotiation of the Creating Opportunities for Youth and Women Empowerment in Africa (COYWA) programme—a EUR 20 million four-year initiative funded by Spain through AECID. The proposal was accepted with minimal alterations, a testament to the depth and rigour of her analytical work. The first EUR 5 million tranche was disbursed in December 2023, with the second tranche of EUR 5 million following in September 2024.
Her EUR 20 million COYWA proposal was accepted by Spain with minimal alterations — a masterclass in development finance architecture.
Beyond the numbers, her footprint extends across the full spectrum of multilateral and bilateral partnership development. She has coordinated diplomatic missions for the AUDA-NEPAD CEO, leading engagements in Brussels with the EU’s INTPA directorate, OACPS, ENABEL and the Belgian Foreign Ministry; in Berlin with BMZ, GIZ and KFW; and in Washington DC with the World Bank, IFC, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Corporate Council on Africa, and Columbia University. She has engaged the G20, G7, TICAD, FOCAC, EU-Africa platforms and the OECD. She has mapped resourcing flows across more than twenty multilateral institutions. She has supervised teams, trained staff, run masterclasses, and built systems—the quiet infrastructure of an institution that is learning to fund itself.
Pioneering institutional development: Social protection and resilient Africa
Most recently, appointed Senior Programme Officer for Institutional and Social Development under the newly created Human Capital, Institutional and Social Development Directorate (HCID), Muzawazi has been entrusted with operationalising the agency’s first-ever Institutional Development Division. The mandate is expansive—and the results already substantial.
She has led the design of two landmark programmes. The first is the Strengthening National Institutions Working with Vulnerable Communities (SNVC) project, a EUR 34 million initiative focused on building the capacity of African institutions to protect the rights of individuals—including children’s survival rights and adolescent girls’ sexual and reproductive health—in collaboration with Regional Economic Communities, Member States, and development partners including the EU, OECD, GIZ, AFREXIM, Irish Aid, Finland, and the Mastercard Foundation. The second is the Africa Resilient Institutions Project (ARIP), costed at EUR 6 million, which houses the Executive Ministerial Fellowship Programme and the Africa Governance Platform, dedicated to strengthening Africa’s public sector institutional landscape.
Adding another dimension to her already impressive portfolio, Muzawazi conceptualised the African Art and Artefacts Return Index project (A3RI)—a culturally resonant initiative aimed at addressing the historical injustice of African heritage held outside the continent, developed in partnership with UNESCO, the University of Pretoria, and AFREXIM Bank. It is a project that speaks to a side of her work rarely captured in funding spreadsheets: an abiding conviction that Africa’s development is inseparable from its dignity.
Wits University and NEPAD
A significant marker of Muzawazi’s growing stature in intellectual and policy circles was her central role in cementing the strategic partnership between AUDA-NEPAD and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits)—one of Africa’s foremost research universities. She served as the lead AUDA-NEPAD representative in brokering the collaboration, which is designed to anchor the agency’s work in rigorous academic research and to forge institutional pathways between continental policy frameworks and the university’s considerable intellectual capital.
Her presentation at Wits, which anchored the launch of the partnership, was a commanding exercise in translating the complexity of Agenda 2063 into an agenda that academics, researchers, and students could engage with substantively. The initiative points to a conviction she holds deeply: that durable institutional capacity on the continent requires the academy and the policymaking apparatus to speak the same language—and, eventually, to share the same ambition.
The measure of a career
To assess Daphine Muzawazi purely through the lens of funding secured—significant as that is—would be to miss the larger architecture she is building. Over ten years in the AU system, she has created or co-created institutional frameworks that did not exist before her: a Resource Mobilisation Unit and its first-ever strategy; a Continental Business Network that bridges public infrastructure planning and private capital; a Social Protection programme for the continent; a Resilient Institutions project grounded in governance realities; and an Institutional Development Division within HCID that is now being stood up to serve fifty-five Member States.
She has done this as a woman, as a Zimbabwean, and as a professional who entered the AU system not through the fast lane of political appointments but through the deliberate accumulation of technical expertise, institutional trust, and an unyielding capacity for hard work. In an era when African institutions are rightly under pressure to produce—not merely plan—she represents the class of professionals that makes the difference between aspiration and delivery.
“I believe AUDA-NEPAD will benefit immensely from my proven track record in institutional strengthening, partnerships, resource mobilisation, and project implementation.”—Daphine Muzawazi.
For The African Mirror, which has long maintained that the continent’s future rests on the shoulders of Africans who refuse to wait for the world to invest in them—who go out instead and compel that investment, on their own terms—the career of Daphine Hazvibvi Muzawazi is less a profile than a proof of concept.
Africa is building. And she is among those who are laying the foundations.
The African Mirro
This article originally appeared on The African Mirror’s website and is published with permission.