For four days in November 2016, 28 participants from 8 African countries gathered in Cape Town, South Africa to kick-off a one year lab to stimulate collective change for a wellbeing-centered development model in Africa.
The participants of the WE-Africa lab come from diverse backgrounds and sectors. They are academics, business leaders, social innovators, policy makers, civil society activists and others. All of them are united in their passion for and commitment to the economic and societal transformation of the continent. The lab will allow them to share their knowledge and perspectives of a well-being economy, discovering new angles and approaches to change and put ideas to action.
The lab has been launched by the action-research network WE-Africa, the Global Leadership Academy and the African Centre for a Green Economy and is supported by the GIZ and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The lab provides space for enquiry and experimentation around the following core objectives:
- Fostering individual and collective leadership;
- Encouraging cross-sectoral collaboration;
- Developing transformative action;
- Supporting a continental network of change agents;
- Impacting public discourses on development.
Rehana together with Nimmo Bassey, Desta Mebratu and Louise Van Rhyn will be resource persons available to lab participants on this one year journey. Nimmo from Nigeria is the director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation and Coordinator of Oil Watch International. Desta hails from Ethiopia and is an associate professor at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at the School of Public Leadership at Stellenbosch University. Louise van Rhyn is the founder of Partners for Possibility and CEO of Symphonia.
