Beyond Training: Building Systems That Let Africa’s Public Servants Deliver

By Chioma Njoku, Director of Programmes, Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation

Africa does not have a talent problem. Walk into any ministry, any government agency, any public institution in Nigeria, and I dare say, across the continent, and you will find people who are capable, committed and aware of what needs to change. What you will also find, often, is that the system around them is working against them. That is the real challenge, and one we rarely talk about honestly enough.

Public servants across the continent are being asked to do more than ever: deliver better services, respond effectively to emerging challenges, manage resources with care, and plan for long-term development in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world.

There is genuine momentum around reform, and growing investment in training and leadership development across the public service. But there is also increasing recognition that lasting impact requires more than strengthening individual capability.

It requires continuously improving systems within which leadership and technical competence are exercised. When both come together, capable people and enabling institutions, the potential for sustained progress becomes real.

The Problem With How We Usually Think About “Capacity”

For decades, capacity building has meant training. Send people to workshops. Build their skills. Expose them to new ideas. And then expect transformation to follow. But anyone who has spent real time inside government knows it is rarely that simple.

A public servant can complete the best programme in the world, return home with new frameworks and fresh energy, and still find themselves trapped in the same system: unclear mandates, fragmented authority, slow processes, and competing political pressures that have nothing to do with what they just learned. In that environment, knowledge alone cannot change outcomes. This is not a failure of the individual, but a failure of the environment they are returning to.

If you want better outcomes from government, you must build better systems for the people inside it

This is not just an African challenge. Global development thinking has been moving in this direction for years. The World Bank has repeatedly shown that development is shaped not just by skills, but by institutions: the rules, incentives, and systems that determine how people actually behave.

The United Nations Development Programme has made a similar argument, stressing that real capacity lies in whether institutions themselves can function effectively, not just whether individuals are trained. And the OECD has also emphasised that performance depends heavily on organisational systems and culture, not training interventions alone.

Put simply, training matters, but it is not the same as transformation.

The Real Issue: Systems That Don’t Support Performance

One of the most persistent challenges in public sector reform is what happens after the workshop ends and the policy document is developed.

In many African public institutions, responsibilities are unclear, authority is fragmented, and accountability rarely matches decision-making power. Budget releases are delayed. Political priorities shift mid-year, especially in years preceding elections. Informal relationships often carry more weight than formal mandates, and civil servants are frequently expected to deliver results in conditions that make consistent performance almost structurally impossible.

Africa does not have a talent problem

This is why reforms so often look good on paper but stall in practice. Not because people don’t care, but because the system they are working in was never designed to make their work easier. It was designed to manage risk, preserve hierarchy and maintain control. Performance, in many cases, was not the primary design goal.

That is a harder truth, but one worth naming.

So, What Do We Do Differently?

If the problem is systemic, the response has to be too. Our approach at the Foundation is built around three connected ideas.

We invest in people, but differently. We work with public servants who are already inside the system. Not simply to train them, but to help them lead differently within the realities they face: navigating competing pressures, influencing without always having formal authority, and sustaining momentum when institutional resistance is high. We select people who have already demonstrated a commitment to change. Our role is to sharpen that commitment and give it direction.

We work with institutions, not around them. Real change doesn’t embed itself if the institutions stay the same. We engage directly with ministries and agencies to improve how decisions are made, how performance is tracked, how accountability is structured, and how teams collaborate. We do this because we know that a trained individual inside a dysfunctional system will eventually be absorbed by it.

We treat delivery as the classroom. The most powerful learning doesn’t happen in a training room. It happens inside the work itself, while solving real problems, under real constraints, with real consequences. We design our programmes around this reality because theory without practice doesn’t produce leaders. It produces well-informed bystanders.

Leadership In the Real World of Government

Anyone who has worked in or alongside government knows it is rarely a clean system. Authority is distributed across multiple actors. Decisions are slow. Priorities shift without notice, and informal relationships frequently shape outcomes that formal structures were supposed to determine. In that kind of environment, leadership is not primarily about control but about persistence. It is about finding ways to keep moving when the system is not fully aligned. It is about working through people, building coalitions, and making enough progress that momentum becomes hard to reverse.

This is why we are drawn to approaches like problem-driven iterative adaptation, developed at the Harvard Kennedy School, which starts from a deceptively simple idea: don’t import solutions. Work through problems until solutions emerge from the context itself. That is how real change happens in government. Not through blueprints imported from elsewhere, but through patient, adaptive work done by people who understand the system they are operating in.

This is exactly the kind of leadership we are working to build.

From Individual Excellence to System-Wide Capability

It is tempting to celebrate exceptional individuals in public service, and sometimes, they do make a decisive difference. But we know that systems cannot be built around individuals. When transformation depends on a handful of exceptional people, it becomes fragile. It doesn’t survive leadership change, it doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t last.

What lasts is when good practice becomes embedded in how institutions actually work. When processes, incentives, and expectations are aligned in a way that makes strong performance more likely, not a function of who happens to be in post. That is what institutional strengthening really means. Not heroics. Not isolated success stories that disappear when the person moves on. But systems that consistently produce results, regardless of who is in the room.

This is the standard we are working towards.

Why This Matters Now

Africa is at an inflexion point. Population growth is accelerating. Cities are expanding faster than the infrastructure to support them. Climate pressures are intensifying across agriculture, water, and energy systems and public leaders are being asked to deliver more, more efficiently, more equitably, and with greater transparency than ever before.

Frameworks like the African Union’s Agenda 2063 set out an ambitious vision for what the continent can become. But vision without institutional capacity is just aspiration. Realising those goals requires public sector systems that work. Not systems that look good in policy documents, but systems that deliver in practice, consistently, at scale, and across leadership transitions.

The gap between Africa’s ambitions and its current institutional capacity is real; closing it is urgent, and it will not happen through training programmes alone.

Why We Exist

This is why we exist. At the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation, we hold one conviction above all others: if you want better outcomes from government, you must build better systems for the people inside it.

We are not in the business of producing better-trained individuals in unchanged environments. Rather, we are in the business of strengthening the environment itself, so that the skills, commitment, and ambition of Africa’s public servants can translate into results for the people they serve.

Africa does not lack capable people. It never has. What it needs are systems strong enough to let that capability work.

That is the gap we are committed to closing. One institution, one leader, one reform at a time.