Why is the DGMT Innovation Fellowship extending the age criteria to 40 in Cohort 9?
For years, leadership development programs have operated under the implicit assumption that by your mid-thirties, your leadership trajectory should be clear. You should have accumulated enough experience, networks, and authority to be identified as an “emerging leader” ready for acceleration.
But what if that assumption no longer reflects reality? In South Africa, particularly in the non-profit sector, leadership trajectories are not simply evolving. They are structurally delayed. And if our eligibility criteria do not reflect that shift, we risk excluding precisely the leaders our sector most needs.
Across the globe, scholars describe the prolonged transition into stable adulthood as waithood, a period in which individuals are socially recognised as adults but are structurally blocked from full economic independence. In Waithood: Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage and Childbearing, the authors show how economic precarity delays the milestones traditionally associated with adulthood: secure employment, financial autonomy, long-term planning, and stability. In South Africa, waithood is not a marginal phenomenon. It is systemic.
Youth unemployment remains among the highest in the world. Even highly educated professionals often move through cycles of short-term contracts, consulting roles, and project-based work. Permanent positions are scarce. Institutional stability is fragile. Economic independence is delayed. These conditions do not simply affect livelihoods. They reshape leadership formation. When economic stability arrives later, consolidation arrives later. When consolidation arrives later, durable influence emerges…. You guessed it, later. Yet many leadership pipelines, including fellowship programmes, continue to assume that by 35, a leader’s trajectory is largely set. That assumption increasingly misaligns with lived reality.
On the surface, the non-profit sector appears to offer early leadership opportunities. We are invited to sit in board meetings, contribute to writing proposals, coordinate events, present at conferences etc (phela thina we pride ourselves in wearing many hats angithi). Compared to corporate environments, hierarchies are often flatter. Young professionals are entrusted with programme management, innovation design, and community engagement early in their careers. However, early responsibility should not be confused with consolidated leadership. In many organisations, funding cycles are short and unpredictable, institutional continuity is fragile, strategic authority is shaped by external donor priorities, and career progression pathways are unclear or limited.
For instance, as a 32-year-old youth programme manager, I oversaw complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives while remaining on a year-to-year contract. At 35-year-old as Head of Programmes, I caried immense accountability, strategic programme implementation, and design, but I was still building the networks required to influence policy or philanthropy at scale. The list goes on. The point is that titles may arrive early, but stability and influence often arrive later.
Leadership in this context is not delayed because of a lack of talent or ambition. It is delayed because the structural conditions that enable consolidation, stable institutions, predictable funding, long-term mentorship, and economic security are themselves fragile. If we ignore this reality, our leadership criteria risk privileging those who had early access to stability rather than those who have persevered through structural constraint (and many of the leaders that the sector NEEDS are affected by the structural constraints, I argue).
Taking the above into consideration, I’m beginning to think many fellowship age caps were designed for a different era, one that assumed more linear career progression. Education led to stable employment. Stable employment led to upward mobility. Leadership consolidation by the mid-thirties was realistic.
Today’s pathways are nonlinear. Leaders move laterally across organisations. They straddle consulting and employment. They pause and restart initiatives in response to funding cycles. They accumulate experience in fragments rather than through uninterrupted progression. When eligibility ends at 35, an implicit message is sent: leadership potential should already be fully formed, and as a 36-year-old, you have missed “the train”.
In South Africa’s non-profit ecosystem, many leaders are only reaching meaningful consolidation in their late thirties. This is not a personal delay, lack of grit, or passion. It is a structural one. Therefore, if leadership consolidation is occurring later, then age-restricted models that do not adapt risk narrowing, rather than expanding the pipeline of transformative leadership. The questions, then, are simple yet urgent: Are our fellowship age limits aligned with contemporary leadership trajectories, or with outdated expectations? Are we not excluding the leaders we need as the results?
As the DGMT Innovation Fellowship, we have chosen to respond to this structural shift. For Cohort 9, we have extended our age eligibility from 25–35 to 25–40. This decision is not cosmetic. It is contextual. It reflects an understanding that:
- Career consolidation in the non-profit sector is slower and more fragile.
- Social capital accumulates over extended timelines in unstable environments.
- Leadership maturity often deepens through sustained navigation of complexity, something that cannot be rushed.
By 38 or 39, many non-profit leaders are not past their window of emergence. They are just entering a phase where experience, resilience, and strategic clarity converge. If we are serious about supporting the leaders our country needs, then our criteria must reflect when leadership consolidates, not when we assume it should.
Having said that, we recognize that this shift invites a broader reflection for fellowship designers, funders, and sector leaders. Age limits often signal a commitment to youth. But in contexts of prolonged economic instability, they may unintentionally exclude those still navigating structural delay. If leadership trajectories are changing globally, and particularly in unequal societies, then our support systems must evolve accordingly. The future of South Africa’s civil society depends on leaders who can hold complexity, sustain institutions through uncertainty (Rufaro Mudimu), and build durable networks of change. Many of those leaders are consolidating their influence later than previous generations. We must meet them where they are.
All that to say: If you are between the ages of 25 and 40, working in South Africa’s non-profit sector, and building leadership in an environment marked by funding volatility, delayed stability, and nonlinear progression, you are not behind. You are navigating structural reality. Leadership is taking longer, and our commitment, as the DGMT Innovation Fellowship, is to ensure that our criteria do not exclude the very leaders our country needs now.
The DGMT Innovation Fellowship has extended its age criteria to 40 for Cohort 9, not as a simple adjustment, but as a response to a deeper reality. In South Africa’s non-profit sector, leadership journeys are rarely linear. They unfold within unstable systems, short-term funding cycles, and delayed economic security.
This piece reflects on how structural conditions, not a lack of ambition, are reshaping when and how leadership consolidates. It challenges outdated assumptions about “emerging leaders” and asks an important question: Are we designing opportunities for the world as it is, or the world as we think it should be?
If you’ve ever felt like you’re “behind,” this is a reminder, you’re not. The timeline has shifted. And it’s time our systems caught up.