About Us

Profile, Vision and Mission:

The UJ School of Leadership is a hub of teaching, learning, thinking and research about governance and developmental challenges facing governments and the people of Africa. The School is located in the Faculty of Management and it conducts its business from the University’s Soweto Campus.

Consultations amongst the U​niversity’s academics as well as with leading scholars from the rest of the continent have confirmed the need for an intervention that will help create the policy-scholarship nexus, improve the quality of governance and set the continent on a path that makes sustainable development feasible. To that end, the School has course offerings that are designed for Africans with professional experience in such areas of human endeavour as parliament, executive branches of government, the civil service, development work, human rights advocacy, non-governmental organisations and research.

The courses are particularly relevant, but not restricted, to people who are already engaged in careers requiring international expertise, policy and analytical skills in areas such as foreign trade, industrial policy , resource management, building national or regional unity, post-conflict resolution and development.

The programmes of the School are taught through a strong interdisciplinary social science oriented approach, incorporating key elements of economics, politics, social anthropology and sociology. They provide students with intellectual tools they can apply to make their own analytical judgements in relation to development and government, policy making and policy implementation and interventions in a wide variety of contexts. It is for this reason that the programmes reflect a strong integration of theoretical and empirical study, and seek to encourage critical thinking.

The School is committed to enable its students to access high level academic thinking and policy ideas on contemporary debates from around the world and to take forward leadership for development. The students will work with a carefully assembled team of academics with significant experience in research and applied work which has been undertaken for leading international organisations, African and Asian governments as well as international non-governmental organisations.