The EVP Revolution: Africa’s Next Competitive Frontier

By Elizabeth Adefioye | Founder & CEO, Elevare Africa Consulting

Africa’s Human Moment

After more than three decades working across four continents – leading transformations, rebuilding cultures, and helping organizations rediscover what it means to truly value people – I’ve witnessed one truth repeatedly: systems alone don’t change people; people change people, through systems that keep human experience at the center. When leaders get that equation wrong, even the most sophisticated strategy becomes fragile.

Africa – the world’s youngest and one of its fastest-growing continents – stands at a historic inflection point. The African Development Bank projects that by 2035, one in three people of working age will live on this continent – that’s more than 1.1 billion potential innovators, creators, and builders. Yet persistent unemployment challenges threaten this demographic advantage, risking a future where potential becomes a liability if leaders fail to reshape how they think about work, leadership, and culture.

I often say the world’s next growth story will be shaped not by declarations made in boardrooms, but by the systems leader's design to support, inspire, and enable people. The question is whether we, as African leaders, are designing those systems to unlock trust, dignity, and performance – or recycling the same management models that keep potential trapped.

Why Promises Fail

Early in my career, I learned a lesson that has stayed with me ever since: people don’t believe what you declare – they believe what you consistently practice.

For years, the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) was treated as a marketing artifact: a slogan about what organizations offer in exchange for talent. The glossy posters, the polished language – all good intentions. But intentions don’t build trust.

Across Africa, a new generation of workers is asking deeper questions:

• Does my work matter?

• Can I grow here?

• Do I truly belong?

These are not HR questions. They’re existential ones. And far too often, the answers reveal a painful disconnect between what organizations promise vs what their employees experience.

And the data tells the same story. Gallup’s 2024 Global Workplace Report shows African engagement levels trailing global averages by more than ten points, and 60 percent of employees expect to change jobs within two years. Mercer estimates that disengagement can drain up to 18 percent of payroll, while replacing key talent costs as much as twice their salary.

But these numbers simply quantify what people feel: disengagement rarely stems from the company itself – it stems from how leaders inspire, support, and empower their people.

Every time leaders make commitments, they don’t reinforce through action, trust, confidence and security erodes. And once that decline starts, engagement, innovation, and loyalty go along with it. And these things don’t happen overnight – they erode through everyday experiences.

People don’t believe what you declare – they believe what you consistently practice.

From Words to Systems

The organizations I’ve seen truly transform all share one defining trait: they made EVP more than a statement. They wove it into their operating system.

That conviction led me to develop the Human Accelerator Operating System™ (Human Accelerator OS) – the framework at the heart of Elevare Africa. It is not theoretical. It is the synthesis of decades spent helping enterprises translate values into behavior, and purpose into performance.

I built it because I saw a pattern across industries: leaders talk about people as “their greatest asset,” yet operate systems that don’t reflect that belief. The Human Accelerator OS challenges this mindset by helping leaders operationalize trust – designing organizations that accelerate human potential, not restrict it.

It does this through five interlocking disciplines:

1. Purpose-Driven Leadership – Culture changes when leaders do. Every transformation I’ve led began when leaders stopped managing output and started inspiring meaning.

2. Culture as Strategy – The best culture work isn’t about slogans; it’s about system design. What you reward, tolerate, and model every day defines what you become.

3. Human-Centered Design – Work should be built around people, not the other way around. Policies, processes, and experiences must reflect how humans live and grow.

4. Adaptive Talent Systems – In an age of AI and rapid change, employability is the new job security. Talent systems must make learning and mobility constant.

5. Metrics That Matter – If you don’t measure it, you can’t sustain it. Belonging, inclusion, innovation, and leadership behavior must be tracked with the same rigor as revenue.

When these disciplines interact, EVP evolves a promise into an operating system for credibility and performance.

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Lessons from the Field

Throughout my career, I’ve seen firsthand how human-centered systems reshape organizations.

Case 1 – Building Belonging After Rapid Growth

During my time leading people operations at a global manufacturing company, I inherited an organization that had grown through acquisitions but hadn’t yet become an integrated company. Employee surveys were flat; people described the culture as fragmented. Together, leaders with the buy in of employees redefined the EVP to make belonging a strategic objective – embedding it into leadership behaviors, recognition programs, and how success was measured.

Within 24 months:

• Engagement scores rose meaningfully

• Voluntary turnover decreased by double digits

• Leaders began managing not just for results, but for connection and consistency

It was a clear example of how intentionally designed people systems can transform morale and performance.

Case 2 – Strengthening Culture Through Leadership Behaviors

At a Fortune 250 enterprise, the challenge was different. The culture was strong on paper, but emotionally distant. We redesigned leadership expectations around four values – courage, integrity, collaboration, and inclusion – and tied behavior scorecards directly to compensation.

This change moved leadership discussions beyond results alone and reinforced how those results were achieved – the behaviors, collaboration, and values weaved into the process. Over time, the culture became one of the company’s strongest competitive advantages.

These examples are not abstract frameworks – they are real-world proof that people experience drives enterprise performance. When EVP is embedded into how leaders lead, keeping promises becomes the natural outcome, not a forced aspiration.

That is what the Human Accelerator OS represents: a repeatable, scalable way to embed credibility into every system that touches people.

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Reclaiming the Human Advantage

Africa has the world’s youngest workforce and one of its fastest-growing consumer bases. Yet youth unemployment remains above 30 percent, and LinkedIn Insights shows that 40% of African professionals are considering relocation. Our challenge is not a lack of talent — it is a lack of human-centered systems that keep talent inspired and retained.

Gallup estimates that if African enterprises raised engagement by just five points, the continent could unlock US $25 billion in productivity every year. But beyond the economics, the EVP revolution is about dignity – about building workplaces worthy of the ambition of African people.

This is why I founded Elevare Africa: to bring global lessons home and build the continent’s first generation of human-centered growth systems. The Human Accelerator OS is designed for our context – where informality meets innovation, and purpose co-exists with profit.

Africa does not need imported playbooks. We need systems shaped by our realities – community, resilience, creativity, and shared ambition.

Every credible EVP multiplies trust. Every job designed with dignity strengthens the social fabric. Every organization that keeps its promises contributes to the continent’s long-term competitiveness.

The Leadership Reckoning

After decades in boardrooms, I’ve realized something important: most leaders do not wake up intending to disappoint their people. They genuinely want to create great experiences. But intent is not impact. What shapes culture is the willingness to hold ourselves accountable – to measure the invisible forces that determine whether people choose to give their best.

The future of African business will be defined by the governance of human experience. The best boards already review belonging scores and engagement data alongside profit and risk. Deloitte calls this “experience as ESG.” I call it common sense. Because in an era where employees are also brand ambassadors and innovators, human experience is business performance.

For African CEOs, the choice is clear: treat EVP as an HR initiative, and it will remain a poster on the wall. Treat it as a strategic operating system, and it becomes the engine of trust that sustains growth.

Five questions now separate the organizations that will lead from those that will follow:

1. Are we measuring what matters, or what’s easy?

2. Do our systems enable trust, or merely enforce control?

3. Are our leaders living the values we post on walls?

4. Does our EVP speak to this generation’s purpose?

5. Are we willing to make human experience a board-level metric?

The answers will define the next decade of African competitiveness in the workplace.

Most leaders do not wake up intending to disappoint their people. They genuinely want to create great experiences. But intent is not impact.

Designing Africa’s Next Growth Story

I believe Africa’s next competitive frontier isn’t technological or mineral – it’s human. And it will belong to leaders who understand that people are not an expense line; they are the multiplier.

The EVP revolution isn’t about rewriting corporate values – it’s about re-engineering the architecture beneath them. It’s about turning culture from aspiration into system, and leadership from intention into impact.

As someone who has led these transformations around the world, I can tell you: the organizations that endure are the ones that keep their promises – to employees, to customers, to society. The Human Accelerator OS simply gives structure to that truth.

At Elevare Africa, we describe it this way: Purpose fuels belief. Culture delivers it. Systems sustain it. Metrics prove it. When those elements align, growth accelerates – not just for business, but for people.

A Call to Courage

In the end, this is not just a business argument. It’s a moral one. Because every time an organization breaks its promise to its people, it erodes the social contract that holds our economies together.

I’ve watched what happens when trust is restored – when employees feel seen, when leaders lead with empathy, when culture becomes strategy. Performance follows, yes. But something deeper happens too: people begin to believe again.

That belief – multiplied across industries and nations – is what will define Africa’s century.

So here is my challenge to every leader reading this: make human experience your legacy. Treat EVP not as a statement, but as a system. Build cultures that prove, every day, that leadership still has a human heart.

Because the future isn’t waiting for us to catch up – it’s waiting for us to elevate.