For an entrepreneur who’d been raised in academia, the Leadership and Society Initiative (LSI) fellowship inspired the clarity and courage to launch a legacy project honoring his father.
By the time Amaechi Ndili reached his late fifties, he’d enjoyed three decades as a successful entrepreneur and financial professional. Before that, he’d spent 15 years abroad, earning advanced degrees and establishing a prestigious career at top financial firms. He found himself entering the “third quarter of life,” he says, “where you’ve had a great career with an aggressive trajectory and you can kind of take your foot off the gas.”
Amaechi had done well enough financially to start transitioning to retirement if he chose to. But existential questions nagged: “What difference have I made in the world? Is it enough? Can I be doing more?”
In the spring of 2023, Amaechi received an email from the University of Chicago about a new fellowship called the Leadership and Society Initiative, designed to “help accomplished leaders live meaningful lives by activating their encore chapters for the good of society.” It sounded interesting, but he forgot about it until one of his sons asked if he’d considered it.
Amaechi pulled up his inbox and found the email. Good timing: it just so happened to be the last day that LSI was accepting candidacies. Upon second glance, LSI sounded like just the right vehicle to help Amaechi reimagine his next phase of work and life.
He applied, was accepted and, after completing the inaugural LSI fellowship in May 2025, came away with a crystallized sense of mission and purpose: to empower young adults as they enter the challenging West African job market. “We’ve got to give them a deep level of skills,” he says, “and we’ve got to give them an entrepreneurial mindset so they can create their own enterprises.”
Born in Ibadan, Nigeria in 1965, Amaechi grew up immersed in academia. His mother worked as a high school administrator; his father was a nuclear physics professor who became president of the University of Nigeria, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture. A job offer brought him to England, where he pivoted to a masters program in construction management and land economics at the University of Bath. After a few years, he left the U.K. to study finance and real estate at the Wharton School, which led to jobs at Credit Suisse First Boston, McKinsey & Company and GE Capital.
By 2004, Amaechi was ready to return to the country of his birth, where he built a conglomerate called Lionstone Group (offshore oil, real estate, hotels, and airline catering) and later became the CEO of a healthcare technology platform called CarePay Nigeria. Along the way, recognizing the need for professional advancement training within Lionstone’s hospitality division, he founded a vocational school. He also started accumulating land in the hopes that, someday, he could expand the footprint and reach of the school.
In 2023, when the LSI opportunity came along, Amaechi found himself at an inflection point. “My business was very profit motivated, and I’d gotten a little weary of constantly talking about profits and returns,” he says. “Even though I was offering employment to a wide swath of people, I didn’t feel like I was doing enough to make a real difference. I didn’t move back to Africa just because there was a profit to be made. Something was missing.”
LSI gave Amaechi time and space to explore the purpose of his next chapter and to consider what societal needs he could address. He took an array of core and elective courses in areas ranging from sociology and Chinese philosophy to education, management, and capital markets. He pondered questions like, How do we eradicate poverty on a systemic level? What does it mean to live a life that is flourishing? What is wisdom? And he forged deep relationships with the nineteen members of his cohort, all of them kindred spirits.
“Most people in the program were in a position where they felt like they had done well enough, and it was time to give something back,” Amaechi says. “To expand one’s horizons and see where one could best serve their community or country or society.”
For Amaechi, the lightning-strike moment came after a dinner with New York Times columnist and LSI Senior Advisor David Brooks.
“David was talking about how you get to know your purpose in life,” Amaechi recalls. “He said something like, when you go to bed, think about three or four things that have gotten you excited, and try to draw a line through them. At the end of the line, that’s your purpose.”
Lying in bed that night, Amaechi asked himself: What have I been happiest about? What has made me most proud?
“The answer was graduating students from my vocational academy,” he says. “And sitting down and planning what a curriculum looks like. Then, I found that I could trace a throughline all the way to my time growing up on a university campus, and how intellectually rich that was, and the opportunities that it opened up. I realized I wanted to do something more in vocational education. It was a moment where I said, ‘That’s it. That’s what I’m going to do.’ That’s why I’ve been buying up all this real estate without knowing what I’m going to do with it.”
As Africa’s young population rapidly multiplies, according to Amaechi, economic opportunities aren’t keeping pace. He says roughly 600,000 students earn tertiary degrees every year in Nigeria, which only creates about 2,000 jobs annually, “So when you hear about young Nigerians seeking to emigrate, the people who do this are the ones who got out of university and can’t find work,” he says. “A substantial number of taxi drivers are graduates.”
Amaechi’s goal is to expand his vocational training program, African Academies, to serve this population across Nigeria and West Africa. The idea is to train students in specialized areas like hospitality, film, music, fashion, food, AI, robotics, coding, sustainable energy and agriculture, while also giving them the entrepreneurial and leadership skills to create and build their own businesses. He envisions a network of self-sustaining non-profit academies, with tuition aid and scholarships provided through fundraising.
“I’m interested in trying to figure out how to take what is potentially a liability on the global balance sheet and moving it to the asset part of the global balance sheet,” he says.
Coming out of the LSI fellowship, Amaechi says he feels a “surge of clarity” and a “level of courage” that he didn’t have going in. Honoring the memory of his father, Frank Ndili who passed away during Amaechi’s time in the fellowship, is another motivating factor.
Ultimately, he says, this next life chapter is more about legacy than profit margins: “If I can pull it off, it will be the most impactful thing I’ve done.”
The University of Chicago Leadership and Society Initiative (LSI) supports accomplished leaders in successfully transitioning from their longstanding careers toward purposeful next chapters. LSI Fellows immerse themselves in UChicago’s unparalleled environment of big ideas and multigenerational dialogue, gaining frameworks for learning from their past and planning for their futures.
Contact us to learn more about LSI.
This piece was developed in partnership with ROAR Forward. Learn more about ROAR Forward here.
At the center of the Design Pathway is a liberal arts curriculum that encourages Fellows to see beyond conventional approaches, engage diverse viewpoints, and develop solutions informed by both reflection and action.
For Bob Oros, an experienced CEO and thought leader in the financial services industry, becoming an LSI Fellow meant entering a new life chapter with a sense of discovery instead of an ironclad plan.
Accomplished Leaders Share Insights through Designing New Courses.