“Leadership is more than skills — it is the courage to create meaningful impact.”

Hello. I am Otis Togbah Tarwoe, Founder of the Visionary School of Leadership and Development. Growing up, I was not raised in comfort. I was raised in the shadow of fourteen years of civil crisis in Liberia. I grew up in Gbarnga, Bong County, in a nation rebuilding its identity, its systems, and its hope. Everywhere I turned, I heard the same sentence: “The youth are the future.” But I could not ignore a pressing question: If we are always preparing for tomorrow, who will lead today? But I wrestled with a deeper conviction: the future does not wait. The future demands leadership now.

What I witnessed in post conflict Liberia was not a shortage of intelligence. It was not an absence of potential. It was a profound gap in structured and practical leadership formation, as well as youth workforce skills development that truly empowers young people and creates real employment opportunities. That gap became my burden. That burden became a vision.

On February 6, 2019, the Visionary School of Leadership and Development was established, not simply as an institution, but as a deliberate response to the urgent crisis of leadership and workforce skills development in Liberia and across the wider region. We did not begin with buildings. We began online with a belief. We began with conviction that leadership can be taught, character can be shaped, and courage can be awakened.

Our mission is singular and uncompromising: to cultivate leaders who are skilled and competent, but also ethical, courageous, and deeply committed to impact. Leaders who do not wait for systems to change, but who build better systems. Leaders who do not inherit broken institutions, but who rebuild them with integrity. But this is only the beginning.

My long-term vision reaches beyond a school. It reaches toward the establishment of Visionary International University, a premier African institution that will stand among globally respected centers of excellence in leadership development, entrepreneurship, governance, and professional transformation.

This vision is ambitious. It must be. Africa does not need small dreams. It needs institutions that redefine standards. The future we once spoke about has already begun.