Burgeoning economies must be fed by an educated and properly trained workforce. Put simply, talent shortages curb innovation, limit market potential and stifle economic growth. Therefore current ‘talent shortages’ represent another stark reality in Africa: A third of the CEOs in a PwC Global CEO Survey confirmed that a shortage of talent curbed innovation or stifled many market opportunities. Furthermore, almost half CEO’s consulted said talent costs had also climbed higher than expected. Recruitment and retention of skilled middle managers was also particularly challenging for 67 percent of the CEOs interviewed

A joint report by the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank lists the top three challenges in sub-Saharan Africa as access to finance, corruption, and finally, inadequate infrastructure through inadequate or outdated investment in capacity building.

AFS contends that to raise education standards and to create a momentum of the importance of learning recognition within Africa, Governments, States and the private sector must accordingly and substantially increase their infrastructure or ’capacity building’ spending. For example, Nigeria as one of Africa’s leading economies, which aims to be among the world’s top 20 economies by 2020.  To achieve this and to even reach the same infrastructure levels that Brazil enjoys today, would require additional Nigerian investment in capacity building in excess of $190 billion or an additional 3 percent of GDP for the next 20 years.

AFS ‘transformation’ programmes introduced through our Business Academy, address these challenges. Short term change through stop gap solutions are reversible and a waste of investment, time and resources. Sustainable AFS resourced ‘transformation’ programmes deliver permanent, well supported industry sectors and underpin self-determination inclusion and empowerment. Our self-perpetuating methodologies, create trade and not aid and deliver hope to struggling Africans.  AFS programmes offer hope where there was once only despondency and despair.

AFS Business Academy Programmes recognise that we can learn so much from existing African practitioners, artisans, local experts and from local culture. Accordingly, one of our proudest attainments is our ability to ‘listen’ and learn. We harness this front line learning knowledge to our sector expertise, our experience, our delivery of cutting edge technical, academic and management techniques and our success in coaching and implementing our management Tools. These tools are user friendly, understandable, helpful and encouragingly engaging. Deployment of our techniques helps build strong local engagement, delivers mutual respect and grows sound relationships. Our project delivery is open to improvement and our content is constantly flexible and our management teams are keen to learn and are always approachable and accessible.  We constantly ‘listen and learn’ on a daily basis which enables our ability to diversify, spread our exposure and mitigate project and sector risk.

Learning is at the heart of all we do and enables us to understand local, regional and National challenges and to provide capacity building solutions which are fit for purpose, helpful, understandable and effective and which deliver permanent sustainable transformative solutions.

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The AFSCfPRD has a unique intellectual power-base consisting of an expanding network of 27 doctoral researches, 13 captains of industries, management consultants, policy development experts and implementation monitoring and evaluation experts.

We are proud to parade these finest minds of next generation African leaders to engage in innovative policy-oriented research and training on crucial development issues in order to shape Africa and Africa’s relationship to the rest of the world.

Our Center partners extensively and actively collaborates with a consortium of academic and professional bodies on multi-disciplinary active research agenda in the areas of Globalization, International Political Economy, Economic Policy Alternatives, Climate Change, Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability and International Trade relations.
We regularly publishes Africa Development Viewpoints (ADV), which draw on background research of members. These viewpoints are designed to spark critical thinking, discussion and debate on policy-relevant advances in research on major development issues.

Capacity building is one of our core interests. To this end, we have established some operating arms for the purpose of training, support, networking and dissemination services to the African and BME communities in Scotland. Please click here to learn more about our incubation and resource centers.

We are happy to welcome aspiring fellows to the center. Our fellowship program recognizes and admits individuals with distinctive achievements and contributions in their chosen fields. Fellows are actively engaged in the research and development programs of the Center. We induct new fellows once in every two years.

We believe that the greatest of the forces are the intangible ones: gravity, faith, love to mention but a few. Our aim is to use the intangible force of Knowledge to create the needed change in Africa

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Our prime focus is in growing a portfolio of development project investment in Africa.

The region has already made big strides below the radar. It now stands to become the developing world’s next great success story. In fact, the International Monetary Fund acknowledges that by 2015, seven of the world’s top 10 fastest-growing economies are African. The future for Africa has never looked brighter. Over the next several decades, sub-Saharan Africa will continue to attract the highest rates of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows per capita of any developing region. Business case studies on the continent suggest that risk-adjusted returns for new investors on the continent have never been higher

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