“In sport, the bench is developed long before the team needs it. Players are coached, prepared, and invested in well before they are called onto the field. No serious team waits for an injury in the final to start thinking about who comes on next.” – Carlee Wolfe, Associate Vice President, Integrated Talent and Organizational Effectiveness at Hyatt Hotels Corporation.
Last week in New York, UNGA brought Africa’s biggest growth priorities into the same rooms: capital mobilisation, infrastructure, energy, climate, technology, industrialisation and entrepreneurship. Each one is critical and deserves attention. However, behind all of them lies a more fundamental question that still gets far less airtime than it should: who will actually lead, build, and deliver them?
That question was at the centre of Building the Bench: Leadership Capacity and Talent for Africa’s Future, a roundtable convened by TheBoardroom Africa and the Institutional Investor Network during 2026 UNGA week. The room brought together investors and capital allocators, entrepreneurs, corporate and HR leaders, advisers and others working across Africa’s economy. They had different starting points, but the conversation kept coming back to the same place.
More than a skills gap
The easy version of Africa’s talent story is often one of a skills shortage. Train more people, close the gap, move on. The discussion showed why that version falls short.
As important foundations, education and technical capability matter. But getting into the workforce is not the same as moving up through it. The distance between a capable professional and a leader trusted with real responsibility is rarely bridged by technical skill alone.
What gets people across it is harder to see and harder to measure: judgement built through experience, exposure to how decisions are made, how organisations work and how to navigate them, professional networks, sponsors willing to put their name behind someone, the confidence to step forward, visibility with the people who make appointments, stretch opportunities that test someone before the stakes are highest, and access to people who can open doors.
These things decide who progresses. Across much of the continent, they are also unevenly spread, often informal and too often left to chance.
Why this matters now
This is a delivery question for the continent’s growth agenda more than it is a talent availability one. Africa’s ambitions are growing quickly. We can mobilise more capital, build more infrastructure, create more companies and expand into new markets. Every one of those steps needs people who can run what is built: leaders who can manage complexity, earn the confidence of investors and boards, and take organisations through growth and disruption.
Capital can be raised in a funding round. Infrastructure can be commissioned on a timeline. Leadership takes years to develop. If the pipeline of ready leaders does not grow alongside the pipeline of investment, the gap between ambition and execution will widen, and it will show up in stalled projects, fragile succession and organisations that cannot scale beyond their founders.
Lessons from the bench
One analogy from the discussion captured this particularly well.
In sport, the bench is developed long before the team needs it. Players are coached, prepared and invested in well before they are called onto the field. No serious team waits for an injury in the final to start thinking about who comes on next.
Too many organisations handle talent the other way round. Leadership needs are dealt with when a vacancy opens, a role is created, or a crisis forces the issue. By then, the options are narrow, and the default is often to look outside, or overseas, for someone who already has the experience the organisation never built internally.
Building the bench means treating career development as a long-term investment, not a response to an immediate need. It means knowing who the next generation of leaders are, what they need to be ready, and making sure they get it on purpose.
Building progression infrastructure
The question, then, is bigger than how we train more people. It is how we build the progression infrastructure that allows more young African professionals to move from potential to capability, to opportunity, and ultimately into leadership.
Infrastructure is the right word. Progression should not rely on luck, on who happens to know whom, or on a few exceptional individuals finding their own way through. It should be designed, resourced and maintained like any other system a growing economy depends on.
That responsibility is shared. Organisations can make succession planning and sponsorship deliberate and hold leaders accountable for developing the people behind them. Boards can ask about leadership depth with the same rigour they bring to financial risk. Investors and capital allocators can treat management strength and the leadership pipeline as central to long-term value, not a secondary item in due diligence. And those already in leadership positions can open doors, provide exposure, and lend their credibility to emerging talent.
Putting people on the agenda
The roundtable made one thing clear: this conversation deserves a much bigger place in Africa’s growth agenda. It should sit alongside the discussions on capital, infrastructure, and technology, because none of those will deliver on their promises without it.
Africa’s transformation will be financed by capital, enabled by infrastructure and accelerated by technology. It will ultimately be driven by people. The work of building the bench needs to start now, long before the team needs it.
