Anzisha names grand-prize winners at the African Leadership Festival

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Four young founders, one instinct: find a problem, solve it, and let the solving open the next stream of revenue.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA [5 AUGUST 2026] – African Leadership Academy campus in Johannesburg hosted the African Leadership Festival, the first to unite Anzisha with Africa Career Networks and African Leaders for Education under one roof, drawing close to 400 delegates from more than 180 organisations across 32 countries. Anzisha Head of Storyteller and Advocacy, Didi Onwu, said “One ecosystem, many pathways, the spine of the festival highlights that Africa’s talent pipeline lives in education, entrepreneurship and career and for the first time, one festival brought all three into the same room.”

The festival is one way to celebrate that ecosystem. The second day of the festival closed with a celebration of the young entrepreneurs as the multi-year fellowship’s grand-prize winners were announced after their final pitches.

Each innovator found a problem their community was living with, built a business around the solution, and kept going, spotting the next problem, and the next, until a single idea had branched into several streams of revenue.

The awards recognised four young African innovators, each receiving a $10,000 prize to grow work already underway.

Myriame Andriamampianina (Madagascar) took the Systems of Delivery prize, awarded for the operational systems a founder builds to scale. In a country where more than 100,000 young people chase roughly 34,000 formal jobs a year, her company Code-Talent built a repeatable engine that places Madagascar’s francophone developers with firms in Europe and Canada — the same five steps, from sourcing to retention, for every client. That system let her branch into four revenue lines and four markets, and open a subsidiary, Code-Talent Canada. “Talent is everywhere,” she says. “Opportunity is not.”

Leu Balate, from Mozambique, earned the Revenue Growth prize for the sharpest rise in profitability. In May 2026, his company Futurist Group posted monthly revenue of $5,156 — $1,959 of it profit, at a 38% margin — up from around $200 a month in January 2026. He got there by refusing to sell one thing: a single training course became a portfolio of open courses, corporate training, geoscience consultancy and partnerships with government institutions, tracked through a CRM he built himself. More than 800 people have now trained with Futurist across over 15 organisations.

“Africa has the land. It has the people. It has the potential. FUTURIST GROUP brings the technology and knowledge to transform this potential into real prosperity,” says Leu.

From Algeria, Abdelouahab Krim, won the Job Creation prize. His study network, BAC Students, is used by 130,000 people across Africa; direct jobs have grown 900% since June 2024, and more than 3,000 teachers now earn through the platform. He is deliberate about who benefits; the share of his hires who are women under 25 has risen from 50% to 90%, with first income for most of them. His method is a system extended through a licensing model that turns each new market into fresh jobs that all have to adhere to the gender equity policy that allows him to boast the high rate of women hires. “Nobody is hired on a feeling,” he says. “Every salary comes out of sales.”

The Storytelling prize, awarded to the fellow who best used storytelling and communication to build visibility and momentum for their venture went to Hope German from Malawi. Hope’s starting point was the talent already around her: convinced that her community held more intelligence and skill than it had room to use, she set out to create opportunities for it. That conviction became a cluster of ventures spanning education, entrepreneurship and mental-health awareness, each built to empower individuals and close the educational gaps that hold people back. Telling their story well is how she has widened their reach.

“The problem isn’t that we celebrate exceptional founders. It’s that we make entrepreneurship look like a lottery for the extraordinary, when it’s a pathway an ordinary young person can actually walk.”

Anzisha is more than a fellowship. Through research, storytelling, and programmes including Idea and Build, it works to create the conditions for very young entrepreneurs to grow sustainable businesses documents their journeys through the YouTube docuseries, The Journey.

Applications for the next cohort open in October 2026. Visit anzisha.org.

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