Our Team
Grace Uwituze
Grace Uwituze makes a place run, and makes it feel like somewhere people belong — two things that rarely live in the same person. She has done it before: operations at Akilah, then general manager of KOKO Club, a Kigali hub where families gathered over good food and easy afternoons. Before that, eighteen months at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali taught her customer service at a standard that does not bend. She studied Information Systems and Management, but her real gift is harder to put on a CV — she makes a room warm and keeps it running at the same time.
Operations Manager
Emily Masaki
Emily Masaki leads education at Akilah — the curriculum, and the people who teach it. She sets the academic direction and holds the bar for it. She has shaped young leaders here before, as a Leadership Instructor at Akilah Institute, and she builds programmes that are rigorous and genuinely student-centred — the kind that teach a young person to think, not just to pass. Her conviction is plain: a real education changes what a life can become. She brings deep craft in educational leadership and curriculum design, and an insistence that the work keep getting better. Whatever Akilah teaches next, it is Emily who turns the vision into something teachable.
Head of Education and Learning
Chief of Staff & Project Manager
Akilah Graduate · Hospitality
Management · pursuing an International
Executive MBASonia Umutoniwase
Sonia Umutoniwase is the steady center of Akilah's leadership — the person who keeps priorities straight and projects moving while the rest of us dream out loud. She runs coordination across the organisation and carries the donor relationships, then does the quiet research that becomes the next partnership. Her path is wide: she built blended-learning programmes at the African Management Institute that reached professionals across Africa, then moved through business development at Q-Sourcing Servtec and operations and events at Andela, Park Inn by Radisson, and Impact Hub Kigali. She is an Akilah graduate in Hospitality Management, now finishing an International Executive MBA. What she does best is rare — precision and warmth in the same person, the one who holds the details and the relationships at once.
Natasha Sukiranya
People and Culture Leader
Head of Finance and OperationsYves Nsengimana
Yves Nsengimana keeps Akilah's numbers — and its mission — on solid ground. Across more than twelve years, he has built financial governance in some of the hardest places to do it: NGOs and public institutions across Rwanda, Chad, and the Central African Republic. He knows budgeting and forecasting, donor compliance, audit, and the ERP systems that hold it all together — SAP, Navision, QuickBooks, UNIFIELD. He holds a Master's in Accounting and is a finalist in the CGMA Strategic Level of the AICPA & CIMA CFO programme. He works in four languages. What he brings to Akilah is the rarest thing in a finance lead — rigour you can trust, and a steadiness that calms the room when the stakes are high.
Anastasie Kakuze
Few people know the Akilah community the way Anastasie Kakuze does. Over nearly ten years she has worn almost every hat there is — crèche manager, admissions officer, tuition officer, and now the coordinator who keeps the operation moving. Today she leads alumni programmes and academic records, and lends a hand across finance and communications whenever they need her. Her gift is connection — she is the one who keeps the relationships and the systems from fraying as everything grows. She is an Akilah graduate herself, a Diploma in Hospitality Management, and she carries the whole story in one person: what a graduate becomes when someone finally hands her the chance to lead. Warm and entirely dependable, she is the kind of colleague a mission cannot run without.
Institute Programmes and Alumni Lead
Akilah Graduate · Diploma in Hospitality ManagementHead of Events
Akilah Graduate · Hospitality Management 2017Rose Muhumuza
Rose Muhumuza has spent her whole career widening what a Rwandan woman in tourism is allowed to be. She graduated from Akilah in 2017 and became the first female safari jeep driver in the country — learning to handle a Land Cruiser over Akagera's rutted tracks when she had never so much as driven a car. From there she came up through the best of Rwanda's hospitality: Eco-Safaris, the Kigali Marriott, and One&Only, the luxury resort at the foot of the volcanoes. Then she did the thing she'd promised herself she would, and started her own tour company. Now she brings all of it home. As Head of Events, Rose is the one who gathers the six thousand — the dinners and gatherings where graduates reconnect across years and industries, and leave feeling part of something larger than their own careers. She runs a room the way she drove that jeep: with nerve, and a grin that puts everyone at ease.
Tech Systems
Akilah Institute GraduateBabra Frida Mulinda
Babra Frida Mulinda builds the digital backbone everyone else relies on without noticing. Over more than nine years in systems and databases, she has become the person who makes the data accurate and keeps it secure — the CRM and the records, the quiet infrastructure that lets an organisation decide well. She is an Akilah graduate, and she came up through the work: IT Manager and Salesforce administrator at CHANCEN International, and a Salesforce data assistant at Akilah before that. She holds a degree in IT Software Engineering and is partway through a Master's in Project Management. What drives her is technology pointed at something that matters — the reliable systems that let everyone around her do their best work.
Natasha Sukiranya builds the culture the rest of this depends on. She has spent more than a decade on people-first leadership — the systems that let an organisation grow without losing itself. At Akilah she leads workforce planning and the whole of HR, and shapes the policies that hold a team together as it scales. She has done this work here before, driving HR strategy and culture in Akilah's earlier chapter, and she now sits on the board of Solid'Africa, advising on governance. She is equal parts systems-builder and people-champion. The culture she sets carries real weight — the standards a serious organisation holds itself to begin with how its people are led. Natasha is happiest building workplaces where the team, and the community it serves, can thrive.