(Photo by iStock/PeopleImages)
For African companies looking to expand, the lack of human-resources skills can be a challenge. To address this roadblock to growth, a program tailored for mid-career African professionals, the RIKA HR Leadership Programme, launched online in February 2022. RIKA helps participants move beyond functional leadership—overseeing recruitment or payroll administration—to become strategic business leaders capable of fostering talent and developing productive organizational cultures.
“Work has changed,” says Kenyan human-resources expert Susan Githuku. “When work changes, you need new skills. And who is responsible for getting ahead of all that? It’s human capital management leaders.” Githuku’s company, Human Performance Dynamics Africa (HPD Africa), is one of the program’s developers.
The course, whose initial cohort had 23 participants from Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda, has five modules—technical, business, digital, leadership, and change—to train participants in how to analyze workplace trends, implement change management programs, and develop pipelines of future leaders. The program is designed to provide essential skills for professional growth, Githuku says, so that chief human-resources officers (CHROs) and those in similar positions can become part of companies’ senior leadership teams, alongside the CEO and the CFO.
The program’s design attracted Diana Gombe. As head of people and culture at international conservation NGO World Wildlife Fund Africa, she was looking to become more strategic in her approach to people management.
Alex Obuhatsa, head of talent and organization development at SBM Bank Kenya, was equally keen to enroll. “There was a huge transformational agenda,” he says. “I instantly knew I wanted to be part of it.”
Such enthusiasm did not surprise Liesel Pritzker Simmons, cofounder of Blue Haven Initiative, which worked with HPD Africa to develop the program. A family office focused on impact investing, Blue Haven invests in mission-driven companies across sub-Saharan Africa.
“A lot of our portfolio companies were struggling to find great people-management training and human capital development,” Pritzker Simmons says. “We’ve seen time and again how deep the talent pool is in Africa, but a lot of people are getting trained on the job.”
Pritzker Simmons and Githuku hope that RIKA can fill this gap. Blue Haven funded the curriculum design, recruitment (social media posts, headhunting, and presentations to companies and HR associations), program delivery, and some scholarships for the first cohort.
A fee of $6,500 covers four months of training, tool kits, case studies, coaching, mentorship, and 360-degree assessments—all available online via a learning management system. Also included is access to the online courses at Josh Bersin Academy, a global professional development academy for human resources.
The virtual format allows RIKA to bring in faculty and leaders from around the world to lead sessions, including the UK’s Exell Intelligence CEO, Deborah Exell; Heineken’s group head of talent and learning, Arnold Dhanesar; and the University of Michigan’s professor of business management Dave Ulrich.
For Gombe and Obuhatsa, the program led them to approach their roles in a new way. “A transformation happened on the first day,” Obuhatsa says. “It was a mind shift for the entire class, from looking at ourselves not as functional leaders but as business leaders.”
Gombe says the course helped her go beyond the technical aspects of HR: “It’s about making sure we have the right people in the right place and developing a culture that allows for growth.”
One challenge for the program is its high cost. While some people may secure funding from their employers, Githuku explains, others want to sponsor themselves to avoid being tied to an organization.
Philanthropy could offer one solution, and Blue Haven has suggested it may continue to fund two or three scholarships a year. Over the next few years, finding ways to expand access to the program will be important for RIKA if it is to help countries across Africa develop fast-growing enterprises and attract the funding needed to meet sustainable development goals.
“Right now, it’s seen as risky to invest in emerging markets because people don’t think there’s a talent pool,” Pritzker Simmons says. “We firmly believe that this is not the case.”
Talent and human capital are foundational to development. “Human capability—talent, organization, leadership, and HR—is often the key to marketplace success,” Ulrich observes. “In emerging markets and growth economies, organizations that attend to human capability will be more successful.”
RIKA could help unlock Africa’s vast untapped potential. “We talk about digital technologies, infrastructure, and energy,” Githuku says. “But rarely do we talk about the human capital needed to transform all these investments. If we’re going to move the needle on the development of the continent, we need to develop human capital assets.”
Read more stories by Sarah Murray.