Brandon Ndikumana

Brandon Ndikumana is a Master in City Planning candidate at MIT, pursuing his degree as a Fulbright Fellow and BAEF Fellow. His work centers on post-conflict and post-disaster rebuilding, with a regional focus on the African Great Lakes region. His approach engages with spatial politics, reparative planning, memory justice, and postcolonial thought, asking how planning and design practice can critically integrate and address the region's layered histories of colonial and post-independence violence.

Prior to MIT, he earned a master’s degree in Architecture and Civil Engineering from UCLouvain (Belgium), where his award-winning thesis examined urban and territorial adaptation in the face of hydrological risks in Bujumbura, Burundi. He also worked as an architect in Belgium and Burundi, and as an educator at UNamur’s University Forum for International Development Cooperation (FUCID) in Belgium.

At MIT, he led the relaunch of MIT UrbanAfrica, a student-led platform connecting interdisciplinary scholarship and conversations on African cities within and beyond MIT. He is also part of the 2027 organizing team for the MIT Civil Rights Immersion Trek (CRIT), an immersive trip across the American South that explores the history and contemporary legacy of the Black Freedom Struggle.