Case Study: African Leadership University achieves aligned, autonomous global teams and faster student recruitment with Trainual

Aligning Autonomous Team Members Across The World

African Leadership University (ALU) is a fully accredited degree program on a mission to develop 3 million entrepreneurial leaders across Africa by 2035. With a decentralized, asynchronous workforce of interns, volunteers, and employees spread across multiple continents, ALU struggled to scale consistent onboarding, role clarity, and day-to-day alignment — so CMO Justin MacDonald turned to Trainual for a centralized onboarding/playbook solution to get new and inexperienced team members up to speed quickly.

Trainual provided a polished, 24/7-accessible playbook that documents roles, KPIs, and step-by-step processes, plus features like Subject Owners and automatic update notifications to keep content current. The result: faster, more autonomous team execution, higher intern retention, and measurable operational gains — Justin reports Trainual has helped “5x and 10x some of the things we’re doing,” freeing leadership time and accelerating ALU’s student-making machine as they scale.

African Leadership University

Justin MacDonald

Chief Marketing Officer