GAGGA Leadership Development Program 2025

Background

Welcome to our 2025 Leadership Development program.

The GAGGA consortium is committed to supporting you with capacity building and leadership development. Leading an NGO in Africa is challenging – often operating with limited funds, stretched resources and under constant pressure and threat. As women leaders, you face a distinct set of challenges, and the question is how to move through your threats and weaknesses and move into your strengths and opportunities.

Needless to say, for you to succeed in your leadership role, you need to adapt, grow and, importantly, take care of your wellbeing. And to do this, GAGGA is delighted to invest in your learning and development through our fifth Leadership Program delivered by The Kairos Project.

Thank you for taking the time to be here today. Take a moment to review the program and if you want to participate, simply complete the application form through the links below. We hope that you will join us on this learning journey.

The Program

This is our new and fifth Leadership program. Every year, you help us evolve the contents and processes to another level. Your feedback at the end of 2024 made it very clear that you wanted to deepen your professional development through one-to-one coaching and GAGGA have slightly increased their budget to make this available.

You also wanted to build on previous learning and application and sharpen your skills around organisational development. We sense an appetite to face into Gender-Sensitive Leadership and what that means for you. And we hear your interest in wanting the opportunity to learn together, to find solidarity in tackling common challenges and to share collective wisdom.

Anticipated topics are: your confidence in leadership; prevention of burnout and strengthening resilience for you and your teams; deepening coordination and collaboration; flexing your leadership style; creating a positive legacy and conversations around the future of funding.

Our program is drawn directly from your feedback:

Executive Coaching – One-to-one
Organisation Development Modules x 4 (105 mins)
Peer Learning Groups x 2 (90 mins)
Buddy Trios x 6 (40 mins x every three weeks)

The idea of this program is to provide you with four unique co-learning spaces – Executive coaching, OD modules, Peer Learning Groups and Buddy Trios. All four spaces allow you to work through your current work challenges drawing on the power of collaboration and collective wisdom.

This approach is a complete departure from the traditional “inform” style workshops. With us, you are an active agent in the direction and focus of these spaces. In the application survey, you help us decide on the OD modules by indicating the subjects that have most value and meaning for you. With Executive coaching, you are responsible for the focus of the coaching and take ownership with applying the lessons and insights; in the Peer Learning Groups, it is you who decides the topics of discussion, one person in the group presents a challenge for you all to explore and come away with concrete, practical actions. The Buddy Trios are a powerful, intimate space for you to collaborate and problem solve with a peer. We give you the process guidelines, you bring whatever matters to you.

Each of these highly interactive spaces serves to increase your awareness and generate new perspectives and this leads to new choices as well as breakthroughs in how you see yourself in your work. Underlying the co-learning model is an incredible sense of belonging, solidarity and camaraderie.

Program Timeline

Meet the team– Weds May 7th, 1400 UK time
OD Module 1– Weds May 14th, 1400 UK time
Coaching Session 1 – between 16^th May-3^rd June
OD Module 2 – Weds June 4th, 1400 UK time
Peer Learning Lab 1– Weds June 18th, 1400 UK time
OD Module 3– Weds June 25th, 1400 UK time
Coaching Session 2 – between 25^th June-15^th July
OD Module 4– Weds July 16th, 1400 UK time
Peer Learning Lab 2– Weds 10th Sept, 1400 UK time

Please look closely at these dates and make sure that you are available before applying. It is essential that you can make both Peer Learning Groups and strongly requested that you are able to attend all the OD modules. You are expected to schedule at least six Buddy Pair conversations.

The times and dates are fixed. All Organisational Development modules and Peer Learning Groups will be held on Zoom

Program Certification

At the end of the program, you will receive a certification of program completion if, and only if, you have attended both Peer Learning Groups and at least 4 OD modules.

Apply Now

Deadline for Applications Friday 18th April, 2025

Organisational Development Modules

Our modules are highly interactive, participatory and immediately applicable to your professional context. The space allows you to go deeper into a specific aspect of effective organisational development – for instance how you manage complex, multi-cultural workforce; how to generate inspiring meetings; how do you embed a culture of continuous feedback; how to create a winning strategy. All of these and much more are essential to growing your people and processes.

Furthermore, you will receive material resources to support your learning and ongoing practices.

Each module is 90 mins at 1400 UK time
Facilitated and designed by Kairos expert in each subject
Kairos Facilitator will provide practical tools, guiding questions and applied learning techniques
Additional materials will be supplied as a Practice and Reflection Guide

Peer Learning Groups (themed and/or emergent)

These virtual sessions are designed to provide a space for peers to connect, exchange challenges and experiences within a structured framework. The Peer Learning Groups can be themed, e.g. around pre-determined challenges that emerge from the needs assessment; or they can be “emergent”, whereby attending peers choose a challenge to work on in each session. Great for building trust in the community and accelerating learning and collaboration.

Each session is of 90 mins duration
Peer sessions take place in smaller group of up to 7 participants
The Kairos facilitator will provide structure and guiding questions and encourage peer exchange, reflection and applied learning
Once established, facilitation can be handed over to the network to strengthen capacity and agency. Kairos can provide mentoring support to build and improve facilitation skills

Executive Coaching

One-to-one coaching is a powerful, intimate learning space for generating self-awareness, seeing new options and possibilities and moving through challenges and barriers in the working environment. The sessions last one hour and, in this time, your coach will clarify your objectives, explore the issues with powerful questions, bring tools and frameworks for generating fresh thinking and new perspective and finally, work with you to co-design actions and practices to take into the world – shifting your habits and patterns for different results.

The coaching is a perfect space for deepening your learning from the OD workshop modules and Peer learning Groups. You will be encouraged to capture topics and issues that are meaningful to you that you would like to explore further.

Coaching Sessions are 1 hour
Participants will have 2 sessions each
Participants select their coach from the program faciliators
Participants can have a different coach for each session
Coach and participant will co-create concrete, practical actions and practices for addressing challenges