Khalid Baddou

Université Mohammed VI Polytechnic

Chief of Staff of the President and Director of Institutional Affairs

Khalid Baddou is Chief of Staff to the President and Director of Institutional Affairs at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, which he joined in March 2018.

During his 22-year career, he has held a number of senior positions in multinational companies, including Nestlé, Merck and Western Union. His assignments have covered regional and international environments: the Maghreb, the Middle East and Africa.

Claude Borna

Sèmè City, Bénin

Managing Director and Chief Innovation Officer

Jérôme Chenal

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne

Director of Excellence in Africa Centre

Jérôme Chenal is an architect, urban planner and Dr. ès Sciences from the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). After completing his master's degree in architecture (EPFL), he worked for several years in private offices on development projects, mainly in Africa, before joining EPFL to write his doctoral thesis on the planning of African cities.

He is now Director of CEAT, a research laboratory at EPFL specializing in urban and regional planning. In this context, he is developing research on African cities, and in particular on urban forms, between land-use engineering and anthropology.

At EPFL, he was one of the first, back in 2014, to embark on the adventure of online courses (MOOC: Massive Online Open Course) on planning African cities followed by tens of thousands of learners around the world. Today, all 5 "African Cities" MOOCs are the subject of a fully online, open certificate course (COS: Certificat en open studies).

Jérôme Chenal is also an expert on complex urban planning projects in many African countries, including Brazzaville, Nouakchott and Abidjan, Dakar, Nairobi, …

He is also a regular speaker and author of publications on African cities. He is also editor of the African Cities Journal, a columnist for Le Monde Afrique and a member of numerous scientific committees.

Since 2017, he is Director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Planning at EPFL and the University of Geneva.

In 2020, he became Director of the Centre of Excellence in Africa, which manages the initiative of the same name jointly with Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, where he is also an affiliated professor.

Today, he works for major Swiss cooperation programs on digital development in Africa and for the African Cities Lab, with which he has developed an executive master's program in Smart Cities Strategy in Africa.

Prof. Helen M.K. Essandoh

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology, Kumasi, Ghana

Senior Lecturer

Sabra Habli

Institut supérieur des Technologies de l'Environnement de l'urbanisme et du bâtiment, Carthage University

Senior Lecturer

Ms. Sabra Habli began her academic career by obtaining a bachelor's degree in Math-Sciences in 1989, followed by brilliant success at the École Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Monastir (ENIM), where she obtained the National Engineering Diploma in 1996, specializing in Power Engineering. She broadened her skills in 1997 with a Diplôme d'Études Approfondies in Energetics - Mechanics at ENIM, before devoting her dedication to research by preparing and defending a PhD thesis under joint supervision between ENIM and the Université de la Méditerranée (Aix-Marseille II), specializing in Fluid Mechanics, in 2002. Her academic trajectory was then consolidated with a university habilitation in Power Engineering from ENIM in 2014. Ms. Habli's research, focused on crucial topics such as renewable energies and waste recovery, reflects her eminent expertise. In addition to her academic achievements, she held the role of Director of Studies and Internships at the Institut Supérieur des Technologies de l'Environnement de l'Urbanisme et du Bâtiment (ISTEUB) from 2017 to 2019, before assuming the position of Director of ISTEUB on November 4, 2019, where she continues to make a significant contribution to academic and scientific development.

Dr. Josephine Malonza

College of Science and Technology in the University of Rwanda

Dean of the School of Architecture and Built Environment

Dr. Josephine Malonza is an enthusiastic and curious architect and urban designer keen on the dialectical relations between Architecture and Society. The empathic engagement with communities, through participatory processes, makes her particularly passionate about quality of life in urban areas. She is involved in international and transdisciplinary research projects crosscutting Architecture, urbanism, education and gender. Engagement with action-oriented research and multi-stakeholder engagement has seen her work widely published. She is a mentor to women in STEM in the East Africa Community (EAC) region.

Josephine holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Nairobi (2018), MSc in Human settlements from KU-Leuven (2012) and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Nairobi (2005). Her doctoral research focused on public space under the research topic: ‘Bringing life into Urban Public Open Space: lessons from the Rwandese akarubanda concept’.

Andrew Tucker

University of Cape Town

Deputy Director and Professor at African Centre for Cities