In May 2026, members of the MCLD team attended the WILD Forum, the WILD Network’s Leadership for Social Impact Forum, bringing together leaders from over 100 countries to explore leadership, inclusion, and systems change. The Forum is a space designed not just for inspiration, but for the kind of honest, substantive conversation that actually moves people.
Reflections by Cathy Amenya, MCLD Programs and Partnerships Manager
Before We Can Lead, We Must Unlearn
One of the sessions that stayed with me most was Sona Jobarteh’s on locally led development. As someone who has spent years working in this sector and wrestling daily with the challenge of shifting mindsets, including among our own people, her approach to education felt like someone finally naming something I had been carrying for a long time.
Education is not a neutral act. Across much of Africa, colonial education systems were deliberately designed to produce compliant workers rather than curious, creative thinkers. That inheritance has not simply disappeared. It lives on in curricula, in classroom culture, and in what we teach children to value about themselves and their futures. If we are serious about building distributed ecosystem leadership, we have to start much earlier. We have to ask what kind of people our education systems are producing and whether those systems are designed to develop people who trust themselves, think independently, and believe they have something to contribute.
Sona’s framing reminded me that reimagining education is not just a policy conversation. It requires a different philosophy altogether, one that places cultural knowledge alongside practical skills and treats learners as whole people with agency. We speak about community-led development, but the deeper challenge is convincing people, including well-meaning practitioners, that communities are already capable, already knowledgeable, already leading. That conviction cannot be imported from outside. It has to be grown from within, and it starts with how we raise and educate our children.
Before any external transformation can happen, something more personal has to shift. We have to be willing to change our own minds first. I see this in my own work constantly. Transformation begins within. If that is true for individuals, it is equally true for institutions. Which is what made the final conversation of the Forum the most uncomfortable, and the most necessary, of all.
We Have the Data. We Need the How.
Another session on women in leadership from Iceland brought everything together for me in a way I did not expect. We had spent two days talking about ecosystems, about growing people, about the kind of education and mindset shifts that make genuine leadership possible. And then this session asked the pointed question: Who actually gets access to all of that?
Right now in Kenya, and across much of the region, we are grappling with women leaders who appear to be little more than mouthpieces for the men behind them. It is a painful thing to witness. But this session reminded me that this is not really a conversation about those women, but one about a system that places impossible expectations on women in power while holding men to no collective standard at all.
Conversations about mindsets and education matter deeply in the context of gender. We are not just talking about changing laws–we already have laws. What we are working on is perception, and perception is formed long before anyone enters a boardroom or a parliament. It is formed in classrooms, in homes, in the stories children are told about who gets to lead and who does not.
We need women in visible leadership roles, not only for fairness, but because representation shapes what young girls believe is possible for them. Role models are not optional extras. They are how the next generation learns what is allowed. When women see other women lead, and lead well, the question of whether women can lead will finally stop being asked.
I am taking three things back to my work at MCLD: a looser grip on control, a sharper eye for who is being left out of the leadership conversation, and the reminder that the most important transformation I can contribute to is still the one happening inside me.