Japheth Habinshuti is the Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) at the City of Kigali and sits on the Global Steering Committee, representing African CROs. He has 8 years’ experience building institutional and human capabilities, developing strategies and delivering interventions that promote sustainable urban development and resilience. Before his current role as CRO for Kigali, he worked as an independent development consultant and later as a senior infrastructure development planner for African Innovators for Smart Civil Engineering Services (AFRISCES Ltd.), a local consulting firm focusing on physical infrastructure design and construction.

Japheth also worked for UNESCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an international science consultant between 2016 and 2017. In addition to coordinating and raising the visibility of the natural sciences program, he has contributed to the elaboration of UNESCO country strategy in the DRC for the period 2018–2021. Japheth’s work in Congo has included building diversified and climate-resilient livelihoods for households in and adjacent to Biosphere Reserves in the DRC, and strengthening institutional capacity for governance and management of those BRs.

He has nearly four years’ experience at the Rwanda Natural Resources Authority as a land use monitoring and evaluation professional. In this role, he made a significant contribution to improving land use planning and management, by monitoring land use practices across the whole country, and by building the technical capacity of districts’ land bureaus for elaborating their district land use plans.

Japheth holds a joint MSc in Regional Development Planning and Management from the Technical University of Dortmund (Germany) and the Austral University of Chile (Chile), and a BSc in Engineering and Environmental Technology from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (now the University of Rwanda’s College of Science and Technology). He has served as a member of the SPRING International Association of Development Planners (SIADP) since 2015.