Bold ambition gets you moving. What decides whether it scales or stalls is everything in the middle: the government door that hasn't been opened, the partner who looks right but won't hold, the proof that lands in one country but won't travel.
Going bigger, faster, and bolder takes more than a strategy deck and a task manager. It takes executives who have done it: for tech companies entering new markets, organisations in transition, and funders building what comes next.
Trusted by 4 heads of state, a Nobel laureate, and Fortune 100 tech leaders.
Forbes 30 Under 30.
20 years building for 40+ countries.
Advisor to presidents, vice presidents, and ministers.
Africa 40 Under 40.
14+ years inside governments across Africa.
We build partnerships from the outside and approve them from the inside. Most of what stalls in emerging markets sits in the gap between those two seats.
Meet the partners →Your product is ready. The market isn't moving. You need the government doors opened, local partners who hold, and proof that travels to the next market.
How we'd work →A new initiative that needs an executive to build it. A bridge leader during a search. Surge capacity for a critical phase. A fractional executive who steps in, leads, and hands over cleanly.
How we'd work →You're building a new initiative in emerging markets. You need someone who has delivered on the ground and will tell you what will actually hold before the money moves.
How we'd work →You have a flagship priority that has to move: a reform, a program, a national initiative. You need the delivery systems, the partners, and the people who have carried priorities inside government before.
How we'd work →You want the expertise in the room to advise decisions. Executives and government insiders who have navigated all of this before and help you make the right calls on location, partners, government engagement, proof design, and global positioning.
If you have a bespoke project or a specific scope you'd like us to consider, reach out. We shape engagements to fit.
Want to explore the fit? Book a call →Call us when the ambition is clear, but the path to delivery isn't. These are patterns we've seen across 40+ countries.
You've got the technology. You know the opportunity is real. But the proof is stuck. Wrong local partner, door that won't open, regulatory barrier nobody told you about.
Most pilots fail not because the technology doesn't work. They fail because scale was treated as a later problem: who implements, who pays, and how the model adapts as you learn. Proof designed to stand still doesn't travel.
The closed-door session where the minister makes a decision. The stage at Davos where the narrative gets set. Both matter. I've designed and facilitated both.
The AI in the classroom only works when you've also solved the electricity, the devices, the internet, and the government sign-off. We'll tell you what your slide deck is missing.
You need someone with executive judgment to step in as a fractional or interim executive — as a bridge leader, as surge capacity, or as exec leadership for a new offer still building to full-time scale.
The sustainability plan in your proposal said government would take it on. Nobody has named which budget line, which directorate, or which political cycle it has to survive. Transition plans written at pilot stage are usually written at 30,000 feet. We bring them down to the ground, name the variables, and run the government conversations while there is still time to change the answer.
The strategy is agreed. The announcement happened. And delivery still hasn't started, because the incentives, institutions, and budget lines underneath haven't moved yet. We have run delivery from inside government. We know where reforms stall, and what makes them hold.
For every innovation with a bold ambition for impact, there are a number of things in the middle that determine whether it scales or stalls.
Moving a proven pilot to real scale is the work we go deepest on. It's why we built the Proof to Power framework, and the diagnostic below.
We bring the experience and judgment to go Bigger. Faster. Bolder.
Pilot purgatory: the pilot worked, the report was glowing, and you're still piloting. Most were designed to prove impact, and impact alone recruits nobody. The people who could carry it at scale weren't in the room, and each of them needed something specific before they'd pick it up. Others stalled on adapting too slowly, misreading the politics, getting the local-global balance wrong, missing the enablers the technology depends on. The proof was never designed to travel.
Proof to Power is a 10-minute diagnostic built on 20 years of watching what scales and what stalls. Answer honestly. Get a straight readout: where you're strong, where you're most at risk of stalling, and the three questions to ask next.
EmBold Partners was founded by Emily Stanger Sfeile after 20 years delivering for leaders whose ambitions change countries. A Nobel laureate. A three-time prime minister. A Fortune 100 tech executive.
Dr. Yakama Manty Jones joined as Managing Partner, West Africa in 2026.
There isn't much of the road from bold idea to scaled impact that one of us hasn't walked.
Meet the partners →Each case designed and led by Emily across her 20 years in emerging markets. Proof and evidence that travels. Positioning that starts from Day 1. A path to scale built in, not bolted on.
Her framework for how it works: Prove it. Position it. Power it.
Co-designed the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge inside State House. Launched in four months. Cost cap built in from day one. Survived COVID. Scaled to 134,000 children across every district.
Built the partnership at TBI that brought Starlink to 50 schools in Rwanda, then 40 health centres, then five more countries.
Read more →Designed the 117 hotline during Sierra Leone's Ebola crisis. A decade later, it's still running as the country's national emergency system.
Brokered the TBI–Planet partnership to embed satellite imagery into Zanzibar's government. Not a pilot. Working infrastructure across 10+ ministries.
Read more →Facilitated a closed-door session at the World Government Summit where a tech exec and a minister unblocked a regulatory issue on the spot. That moment opened connectivity for an entire country.
Executive leadership for bold ambitions in emerging markets.
Bigger. Faster. Bolder.
Emily brings two decades across global institutions, partnerships and complex international initiatives. Yakama has spent 14+ years inside African governments, from public finance and policy to State House and executive delivery, building the systems that make reforms hold. Together, we bridge global ambition and local reality.
Global perspective. Inside-government understanding. One bold standard.
Most people who understand global power have never built on the ground. Most who've built on the ground aren't invited into the rooms where high-stakes decisions get made. I've spent 20 years doing both.
In the room: advising 4 heads of state; working the rooms at WEF, G20, UNGA, and the World Government Summit; partnering with Fortune 100 tech leaders. On the ground: a national crisis command center during Ebola; Starlink in African schools and clinics in weeks; programming built with 40,000 market women; co-creating AI tools for decision-making in emerging markets.
The work lives in the messy bit between "this could work" and "this actually works at scale." From Ghana to Ukraine, Liberia to Lebanon to Indonesia, and 40+ countries beyond.
Today I lead EmBold Partners and work across a portfolio of bold bets, including serving as Executive Director for Emerging Public Leaders on a fractional, interim basis.
Optimistic changemaker. Mother of two boys. Yogi and deep-sea fisherwoman. Someone who takes the seat. And gets it done.
I'm Emily Stanger Sfeile. Founder & Global Managing Partner.
Explore Emily's path →Growing up in Sierra Leone shaped that. Education affects health. Governance affects opportunity. Data affects accountability. The problems do not stay in one lane, so neither did I.
I've spent 14+ years at the intersection of economic policy, public systems and on-the-ground delivery: inside Sierra Leone's Ministry of Finance and State House, leading the President's Delivery Team, and embedded in governments across Africa driving their highest-priority reforms. I've held the roles most advisors only advise on. I've seen what happens after the strategy is agreed: the incentives, institutions, fiscal constraints and relationships that determine whether reform actually moves.
That inside-government experience also shapes how I work with development partners, foundations and investors – translating between what external partners want to achieve and what governments can realistically finance, implement and sustain.
My work has spanned nine countries and counting, but Freetown remains home. Behind every data point is a human being. Transformation happens where evidence meets execution.
Economist. Systems builder. Mother of three daughters. Someone who refuses to choose just one.
I'm Dr. Yakama Manty Jones. Managing Partner, West Africa.
Explore Yakama's path →
Twenty years, four presidents, and the long way round.
At the end of 2025, I left my executive job to build EmBold: executive leadership for bold ambitions in emerging markets. Currently, I'm serving as Executive Director for Emerging Public Leaders on a fractional, interim basis. And in 2026, Dr. Yakama Manty Jones joined EmBold Partners as Managing Partner, West Africa.
The work and the life are the same story.
Global leadership at the Tony Blair Institute: first global health security, then technology for development, then TBI's global partnerships with the world's boldest technology companies. Fifteen-plus partnerships built from scratch. Thirty-six tech-enabled projects across 20 governments. The ones I'm proudest of started as improbable ideas — Starlink in 50 Rwandan schools, then 40 health centres, then five more countries. Satellite imagery working across 10+ ministries in Zanzibar.
At UNGA, the World Government Summit, and Davos, I chaired roundtables where heads of state and CEOs build partnerships that change countries. Every partnership worked for the same reason — a global partner willing to move fast, a government that owned it, and someone trusted by both sides to hold the middle.
In 2014, Ebola hit Sierra Leone. As others flew out, I flew in.
I helped design the National Ebola Response Centre. Built the 117 emergency call line — it's still Sierra Leone's national emergency system a decade later. Ran weekly strategic briefings for President Koroma. When the outbreak ended, I stayed for the recovery, then advised President Bio's flagship human capital portfolio and co-designed the Education Innovation Challenge inside State House. It reached 134,000 children across every district.
Sierra Leone is the country my husband and children call their own. Serving it directly was the honor of my career.
It started with a promise. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first female head of state, pledged to put women in their proper place across Liberia's economy and government. I was 24 at the Harvard Kennedy School. I sought a path to support her government. And then I designed and delivered the programs to make her promise real.
Over six years we built it from scratch: cross-border trade networks, savings and loan associations, business training across 38 markets. The programming reached over 40,000 women, and lending groups ended with average annual savings of $430 per woman — in a country where GDP per capita was $414.
Forbes 30 Under 30 came from this work. The real credential was simpler: I'd learned what it takes to build something from within a government, for a President with huge ambitions, and in a place where nothing is handed to you.
Ten years co-building Bafa Resort on Banana Island, Sierra Leone: the eco-resort my husband and I own on the island our family calls home. A yoga teacher in training. Deep-sea fishing. Two kids raised between West Africa and the Levant. Living one wilder life. The through-line is the same everywhere: get in, navigate the complexity, build something bold that lasts.
UK-trained. Africa-rooted. Built from the inside out.
Today I provide direct counsel on executive priorities and delivery performance to the Presidency and Vice Presidency of Sierra Leone. This is what 14+ years of earned trust looks like. And in 2026, I joined EmBold Partners as Managing Partner, West Africa — bringing that insider knowledge to the innovators and funders trying to build with government.
"Let us be bold enough to redefine success — not by how many people we reach but by how many lives we change."
Project Leader at Delivery Associates, embedded inside governments to drive their highest-priority reforms. Not advisory from a distance: designing the delivery systems they actually use — dashboards, verification frameworks, bottleneck identification — managing the teams and navigating the politics where most interventions stall. Nine countries and counting, including Sierra Leone, Ghana, Lesotho, Rwanda, Benin, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia.
Alongside it, independent research and implementation design for the Gates Foundation, GIZ, IDRC, OSIWA, and CORDAID — and published work in The Lancet Global Health and the Islamic Development Bank Bulletin.
It began with data: building the systems for Sierra Leone's Post-Ebola Recovery Programme on which government decisions depended. By 2017 I led the President's Delivery Team from inside State House — the weekly briefings, the bottleneck identification, the accountability for whether presidential priorities actually got delivered.
Then as Director of Research and Delivery at the Ministry of Finance, I designed the dashboards and verification systems that tracked government performance against national and international commitments, and served as the government's focal person for the World Bank's Human Capital Project. I later presented this work at Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government, the Tony Blair Institute, and the Vice Presidency of Ghana.
I started in 2006 inside Sierra Leone's Ministry of Finance Budget Bureau: reading the numbers at the source and learning the difference between what governments commit to and what they actually deliver. Then postgraduate and doctoral training in Manchester and London — a PhD in Economics and Finance from Birkbeck, University of London, researching debt, natural resources, and growth in fragile states.
I came back. That choice says everything.
Three ventures, one conviction: human capital is the most durable form of development. The Yak Jones Foundation, building citizens' capabilities in literacy and critical thinking. Data Mansah, building community-level capability in data collection and analytics — because the data revolution only works if people understand what the data says. And PI Group, private-sector investment in the economic empowerment of women and youth, and climate action.
