The December university admissions and scholarship season has once again highlighted the global competitiveness of the young leaders attending African Leadership Academy.
Last week, three ALA students were honored as 2011 recipients of the prestigious Robertson Scholarship. Oluwatobi “Tobi” Runsewe from Nigeria, Gift Nyikayaramba from Zimbabwe, and Otieno Anthony Olawo from Kenya join ALA alumnus Dagbedji Fagnisse (Cote d’Ivoire), who is currently a Robertson Scholar at Duke University.
The students were selected as scholars by a distinguished panel of leaders who visited ALA and interviewed seven scholarship candidates. As Scholars, they have won a fully funded, 4-year scholarship to either Duke University or the University of North Carolina. The prestigious scholarship seeks to identify and nurture a community of young leaders who will have transformative impact on our world
But Otieno, Gift, and Tobi are not the only young leaders celebrating admissions, as this week their classmate Courage Matiza (Zimbabwe) learned that he will attend Amherst College next year as a Nelson Mandela Scholar, the only endowed scholarship in the United States named for President Mandela.
Other ALA students have been given early decision admission to universities such as Brown, Penn, Smith, and Tufts in the US and Edinburgh, Leeds and Warwick in the UK. Offers of admission have also come in from universities in Africa, such as the Universities of Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria in South Africa and the United States International University in Kenya.
Most of the current crop of young leaders on our campus will only make university decisions in April, but this news bodes well for the broader set of results expected in 2011.
