Professional Development The Impact of Leadership Training on Employee Retention: What the Evidence Actually Says People leave managers, not companies. This finding is so consistently replicated across organisational research that it has become a cliche. Here is what it means in practice for organisations that want to retain their best people. The finding that people…
Professional Development Why Communication Breakdown Costs Organisations So Much and What Actually Fixes It The large dollar figures that circulate about the cost of poor communication are mostly estimates built on extrapolations. What is not an estimate is the consistent finding that communication failure is one of the most reliable predictors of project failure, employee…
Professional Development Higher Education in Africa: The Countries Leading the Way and the Gap That Professional Training Fills African higher education has produced world-class institutions and professionals. It has also produced a persistent gap between formal qualifications and the applied professional skills that employers in the Gulf, Africa and Asia actually need. Africa’s higher education…
Professional Development The Impact of Continuous Learning on Organisational Growth: What the Evidence Shows The connection between organisational learning investment and performance outcomes is real and reasonably well evidenced. What matters is understanding which learning investments produce which outcomes not all L&D spending is equivalent. The case for organisational investment in continuous learning is well…
Youth Development How Sports Influence Youth Development and Social Skills: What the Evidence Actually Shows Sport is widely assumed to develop character, teamwork and social skills in young people. The evidence is more conditional than this. Sport produces these outcomes under specific conditions and fails to under others. The belief that sport builds character and…
Women in Leadership Women in Ghana’s Public Sector: The Data, the Progress and the Remaining Gaps Ghana has made notable progress on women’s representation in public sector roles over the past two decades. The gaps that remain are structural, well-documented and addressable with deliberate policy and development investment. Ghana’s public sector employs a significant proportion…
Youth Development Youth Empowerment Frameworks: What Works, What Does Not, and What Gulf and African Contexts Require Youth empowerment is one of the most widely used terms in international development and youth policy. It is also one of the most inconsistently defined, which makes evaluating what it produces very difficult. Here is what the evidence…
The GCC training market has grown significantly over the past decade. There are now hundreds of providers operating across the region, from global brands with local offices to regional specialists, from accredited institutions to pop-up training companies that appeared six months ago. For L&D and HR managers responsible for staff development budgets, choosing the right…
Every year, millions of dollars flow into youth programmes across the GCC and Africa. Some of those programmes change young people’s lives. Many do not. The difference rarely comes down to good intentions, funding levels, or even the quality of the facilitators. It comes down to design. A well-designed youth programme has a clear theory…
The skills gap in the GCC is not getting smaller. Despite decades of investment in education and training, the gap between the skills employers need and the skills available in the labour market continues to widen across most sectors in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait. This article analyses where the gap is most acute…
