By the time he was 18, entrepreneur and leadership development guru Fred Swaniker had lived in Ghana, Gambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

What he learned from a childhood across Africa is that while good leaders can’t make much of a difference in societies with strong institutions, in countries with weak structures, leaders can make or break a country.

At a TED Global conference this month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Ghanaian-born Mckinsey alumnus announced his hopes of opening 25 new universities in Africa — African Leadership University. The idea is to cultivate the next generation of African leaders, he said. Each African Leadership University campus will have 10,000 leaders at any given time, he told the TED global audience. “We’ll be developing 250,000 leaders at any given time.”

Sound ambitious? Consider his work so far.

Swaniker, 34, co-founded the African Leadership Academy which opened in 2008. It’s a residential school on the outskirts of Johannesburg for 15-to-18 year-olds from all 54 African countries and around the world. Considered a world-class coed boarding school, it recruits outstanding students from across Africa and prepares them for a future of leadership, according to Forbes.

Swaniker also co-founded African Leadership Network in 2010, made up of a 1,400-plus invitation-only leaders from 78 countries (48 in Africa). Of these, 60 percent are CEOs and business leaders, while 40 percent are leaders in government, civil society, and academia. About 70 percent live in Africa, 20 percent are Africans in the diaspora, and 10 percent are non-Africans dedicated to creating prosperity in Africa.

African Leadership Network was co-foundedby Acha Leke (senior partner, McKinsey & Co.) and Swaniker (Founder, African Leadership Group).

African Leadership Academy opened in 2008 with an inaugural class of 97 students. It teaches a two-year curriculum in African studies and entrepreneurial leadership, as well as the usual academic core subjects. But demand exceeds supply. The school gets 4000 applicants a year, Swaniker said.

Swaniker gave examples of Africa’s last three generations of leaders — good and bad — and said the next generation — what he calls generation 4 — has a unique opportunity to transform the continent.

Generation 1 helped free the continent from colonialism in the 1950s and ’60s, he said.

Generation 2 was marked by warfare, corruption and human rights abuses. “Most of these leaders have moved on,” he said. They were replaced by generation 3, which included Nelson Mandela, “and most of the leaders that we see in Africa today like Paul Kagame of Rwanda.

“These leaders are by no means perfect but they have cleaned up much of the mess of generation 2,” Swaniker said. “They’ve stopped the fighting. I call them the stabilizer generation. They’re much more accountable to the people. They’ve improved macroeconomic policies. They are by and large the best leaders we’ve seen in 50 years.”

Where will the next generation of leaders — generation 4 — come from?

“Do we wait for God to give them to us?” Swaniker asked. “No. It’s too important to leave it to chance. We have to develop these leaders in a systematic way. That’s what we’ve been doing at ALA.

“I believe if we carefully identify and cultivate the next generation of African leaders, the next generation will be the greatest generation that Africa and the entire world has ever seen,” Swaniker said. “(Generation 4 needs) to do two things that previous generations have not done,” Swaniker said. “They need to create prosperity and institutions.”

If all goes according to plan, over next 50 years African Leadership University will create 3 million leaders, Swaniker said. “My hope is that half of them will become entrepreneurs, create jobs that we need, and the other half will go into government and the nonprofit sector and build the institutions we need.

“Think of this as Africa’s ivy league – but instead of getting admitted because of SAT scores or because of how much money you have or which family you come from, the main criterion for getting into this university is what potential do you have for transforming Africa?”