Cohort I · Class of 2026
The people in the room this year.
Drawn from across the continent and its diaspora, the inaugural class reads, writes, and builds in company for a single year. A representative sample follows.
Cohort I · Class of 2026
Twenty-four fellows. One conversation.
Selected from more than two thousand applications across forty-one African countries. Below, a representative sample of the inaugural class.
Adaeze Okonkwo
Public Health Policy
Investigates how primary-care systems collapse under decentralisation, and what reconstitutes them. Capstone: a maternal-care index across three Nigerian states.
Yale, M.P.H. (2024)
Kofi Mensah
Climate & Agronomy
Soil scientist tracing cocoa-belt degradation. Building decision tools for smallholder rotation systems with agricultural extension officers in the Ashanti region.
ETH Zurich, M.Sc.
Naledi Litsoane
Constitutional Law
Studies the place of customary courts within Southern African constitutional orders. Capstone: a comparative reading of pluralist legal architectures in three SADC states.
Wits, LL.B. (Hons.)
Yonas Tesfaye
Computational Linguistics
Builds open-source language models for low-resource African languages. Currently leading a Geʽez and Amharic morphology corpus released under permissive licence.
Carnegie Mellon, B.S.
Rumbidzai Kanjanda
Economic History
Reads twentieth-century African monetary history against the present. Capstone: a slow archive of central-bank correspondence between the OAU and Bretton Woods.
LSE, M.Sc.
Thabo Sithole
Civic Technology
Founder of a procurement-transparency platform used by three municipalities. Studying how civic systems become institutional, and how they fail to.
UCT, B.Sc. (Eng.)
Aminata Diop
Architecture & Heritage
Documents the vernacular architectures of the Sahel under climatic stress. Designing climate-responsive school typologies with municipal partners in Saint-Louis.
GSD, M.Arch.
Joseph Otieno
Mathematical Biology
Models vector-borne disease across the lake region. Working with KEMRI on adaptive surveillance protocols for shifting endemic boundaries.
AIMS, M.Sc.
The full cohort is published each September following the convening week.