Yawa Hansen-Quao, Executive Director of Emerging Public Leaders, discusses the importance of strengthening Africa's public service and of increasing intra-African collaboration for a stronger post-pandemic recovery.

Key Takeaways

Below are some of the main takeaways from COVID-19 Africa Watch’s conversation with Yawa Hansen-Quao – Executive Director of Emerging Public Leaders – a youth-training platform that is driving Africa’s development by creating a new generation of public servants committed to social impact.

• Emerging Public Leaders’ work is primarily motivated by the conviction that Africa will benefit from stronger public institutions. The program aims to fill Africa’s future talent pipeline with competent and ethical young professionals, through a two-year public service fellowship that attracts the best and the brightest university graduates in several African countries. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the necessity of this sort of initiative: it has further increased the urgency of having solid networks of trusted, trained and ethical professionals in the public service, who can enable timely responses to emergency situations.
• The pandemic is showing people that their voice matters. Because of the disruption, combined with new tools that people have at their disposal, citizens are becoming much more active in voicing their concerns, demonstrating, and demanding government transparency and accountability. This is a positive and healthy process in any democracy, and has been largely led by younger generations.
• There is a sense of hope that the new US administration will take a keen interest in supporting Africa’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery. However, at the end of the day, the destiny of Africa lies in the hands of Africans. The pandemic has illuminated to many citizens across Africa the need to look internally, to place more importance on regional collaboration, and to rethink together how to bounce back better, how to recover, and how to maintain a greater sense of autonomy when Africa comes out of the pandemic.
• Research has shown that the pandemic is disproportionately affecting women, notably by restricting their movement and their livelihoods. However, there are opportunities for women and for civil society at large to act as agents of change and to help one another even at the neighborhood level, so as to collectively drive change at the community level. A spirit of volunteerism should be strongly encouraged in this moment.

The interview was conducted by Adwoa Difie Boakye-Mensah, an IFC-Milken Institute Capital Market Scholar from the Ministry of Finance of Ghana.