A New Class, A New Chapter: YELP Welcomes Its 2026 Cohort

Over the coming months, this new class of fellows will walk through the fellowship's signature three seminar journey. That journey opens on the 17th and 18th of July at the Latitude Hotel in Kampala, where fellows will gather for Seminar One, themed The Foundation: Character, Courage, Purpose, built around a simple but demanding idea: that leadership begins on the inside. Long before a fellow ever manages a team, drafts a policy, or closes a deal, they must first reckon with who they actually are beneath the roles they play. Fittingly, the seminar carries the subtitle Shaping Personal Leadership: Who You Are Is How You Lead, an invitation fellows will be asked to sit with questions of character, courage, and purpose, and to leave with a clearer sense of the values that will carry them through everything ahead.

Guiding fellows through some of the seminar's most searching conversations will be Beverly Mutindi, herself a YELP Fellow from the Class of 2018 who now serves as Associate Faculty at the LéO Africa Institute, a reminder that this fellowship has a way of turning its graduates into its guides. She will be joined by other facilitators drawn from across the institute's network of faculty and partners, each bringing their own thread to the conversations ahead.

A Continent in One Room

What makes this cohort remarkable is not just the ambition in the room, but the sheer range of lives represented in it. Fellows have come from across East Africa and beyond, from Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, and Nigeria, carrying with them the textures of very different economies, cultures, and challenges, yet united by a common thread of building something that outlasts them.

Many Professions, One Purpose

Walk through the professions in this class and you will find a small universe of African enterprise and public service. There are lawyers shaping corporate governance and defending institutions with quiet rigor. There is a magistrate adjudicating land disputes and electoral matters, and a sitting Member of Parliament carrying the voice of his constituents into national policy. There are journalists chasing underreported stories in Uganda's West Nile region, and communications strategists who have helped shape public health campaigns reaching millions of people. Tax and revenue professionals sit alongside energy policy analysts working on climate resilience in coastal Tanzania. There are software engineers building health and finance platforms for underserved communities, and entrepreneurs solving everyday problems, from cross border shopping logistics to digital skills training for hundreds of young people across more than a dozen countries.

The cohort also includes builders of community and opportunity in the truest sense. A founder who created a mobile app inside a refugee settlement to help others find services and hope. A youth council chairperson pushing to mainstream young voices into governance. Founders and executives running education technology platforms, digital inclusion initiatives for girls in tech, and mentorship communities for the next generation of women in business. Add to this an operations leader in urban mobility, a manufacturing professional bridging engineering and business, an international relations practitioner focused on peace and security, and a program manager helping connect African youth to economic opportunity, and you begin to see just how wide the fellowship's net has been cast.

" "Every year, this moment reminds me why the fellowship exists. You look around the room and you see lawyers, technologists, farmers, legislators, all at different points of their careers, but all asking the same honest question, who am I really as a leader. That is what this cohort means to us, a chance to invest in people who are already doing the work and simply need the space to become more intentional about it. What I look forward to most from Seminar One is watching that shift happen in real time, watching fellows arrive guarded and leave a little more open, a little more sure of their own foundation. That is the work we came here to do." — Asiimwe Nelson, Programs Manager, LéO Africa Institute

What They Bring

What each of them brings to the table is different, but what threads them together is a certain seriousness about impact. These are not fellows chasing titles for their own sake. They are people who have already built things, fixed things, defended things, and told stories that needed telling, often quietly and without much recognition. Many arrive having led community initiatives outside their day jobs, whether that is organizing young farmers, mentoring girls into technology careers, running literacy programs that have reached millions of children, or founding peacebuilding dialogues among young people. It is this instinct toward service, layered on top of professional excellence, that the fellowship exists to sharpen.

What They Stand to Gain

The YELP fellowship has never been about handing out frameworks and sending people on their way. It is a deliberately unhurried process of formation. Across their time in Kampala and beyond, fellows will be pushed to examine the distance between the leader they present to the world and the person they actually are underneath it, guided through honest conversations about identity, values, and the character that holds up under pressure. They will wrestle with what it means to build with integrity in industries where the temptation to cut corners is constant, and they will hear from leaders who have proven that ambition and principle are not opposites but partners.

Just as importantly, the fellows will be equipped for the long haul. Building anything of consequence, whether a business, a public institution, or a movement, takes far longer than anyone expects, and the fellowship will spend real time helping fellows develop the inner resilience to stay the course when results are slow and the road gets hard. They will look closely at the daily habits and disciplines that separate leaders who sustain excellence from those who plateau, and they will be challenged to define success on their own terms, well beyond revenue or recognition, so that whatever they build in the years ahead is anchored to something that actually matters to them.

A Network Beyond the Seminar Room

Perhaps just as valuable as anything on the agenda is the network itself. This cohort brings together lawyers and technologists, legislators and journalists, entrepreneurs and public servants, farmers and diplomats in training, all in the same room, learning from each other as much as from any facilitator. Across the fellowship's three seminar journey, these relationships will deepen, turning a room of strangers into a community of peers who will call on each other for years to come, long after the first gathering in Kampala fades into memory.

The LéO Africa Institute, alongside its partners, welcomes this new class of fellows with real excitement. They arrive from different corners of the continent and different corners of professional life, but they arrive with the same hunger to lead well and to leave their countries and communities better than they found them. As the fellows prepare to converge on Kampala this July, the Class of 2026 looks ready for exactly that work.