Management and team building - My Chevening Leadership Essay - Leadership and Influencing Skills

Hi everyone, this is my leadership essay for the chevening scholarship and I humbly ask for your kind review. Thank you.

Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries.

Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.

(minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)

My personal understanding of leadership is simply identifying a problem, creating a vision, developing a strategy, and inspiring and motivating people to work towards creating a solution for themselves and for others. I believe that leadership is making a personal contribution to develop people, communities, and the world at large.

As an undergraduate in 2017, it was a frequent situation that female students were getting expelled from the university because of misconduct and engagement in illegal activities on campus, some of them blamed it on low income and inability to afford tuition and other bills for school. It was a cause for concern as I personally felt the pain of watching my friend leave school because she had been expelled alongside other female students. That night, I could not sleep; I thought about what I could do to prevent future occurrences. On the 16th of March the same year, I decided to launch a conference for females on campus to learn vocational and entrepreneurial skills like, baking, copywriting, and marketing strategies. The entire goal was to introduce legal business opportunities for females to take advantage of on campus. Over 200 female students participated in that conference and for the first time I felt like a leader. We would meet weekly to review progress and have conversations about personal development.

These weekly meetings soon became a movement and then a group on campus, this would form the basis of the organization I then created later in 2019 - Femme Lead Africa. I was now clearer about the vision of connecting females, especially in underserved communities to opportunities in entrepreneurship, leadership and technology. We execute gender development programs in communities, organize skill acquisition trainings, seminars and conferences to ensure that more females are getting equipped to take up spaces in various sectors in order to achieve equality.

Over these years of leading amazing young people to execute projects in underserved communities, I have found that I have developed skills in people management and team building, Project Management, communication, critical thinking and problem solving, networking and collaboration etc. These are core skills which I believe will support my study endeavours.

The leadership and influencing discussion is too summarized. Do not tell the reviewer what you did as a leader. Show him. The weakness of the essay lies in the lack of true leadership experiences. Team leadership, conflict resolution, public engagemen, a time leader can narrate how she handled herself in various situations and the impact, consequences, or positive results of your leadership decisions. The focus is good. It relates to emerging local leadership with a potential for national leadership. Implying the continued leadership development will help make it an even stronger presentation. Remove the vagueness. you have to be as specific as you can to become more competitive in the consideration stage.

@houston17 the linking paragraph and the achievement is so cool. But, I think it is better if you could provide some detail, like :
- how big is the organization you've found?

instead of using we, I think it is better if you could emphasize on your achievement (use "I") :
- what you do to expand the organization?
- any problem you've encounter and how you deal with them?