Stephen Àjàdí

Stephen Ajadi is an award-winning architect, a designer, a management consultant, and a development economist, with formal education in all the fields with distinctions. He recently completed his PhD in Land Economy at the University of Cambridge. He has over a decade of leadership and professional experience in architecture and planning with projects in Africa and Europe. His work revolves around the complicated but developmental interrelationship of rural and urban spaces across the world. He is the founding principal of RUBAN and the African Contemporary Institute of Design (ACID). He is also the founder of the Penumbra Space Foundation, an organisation focused on helping people in West Africa affected by conflict and violence through social and physical infrastructure. He sits on the board of a number of organisations in the economics and technology sector. He also leads a series of mentorship programs, some of which have seen protégés enrolled at the University of Cambridge and other institutions around the world. Stephen is also the founding president of the Cambridge Initiative for African Urbanism (CIAU), a research group studying various aspects of African cities with a wide network of African institutions linked with Cambridge. His research achieves implementation through the organisations he leads as well as through government policy adoption. Stephen and his organisations have consulted across Africa and Europe on issues of architecture, the circular economy, real estate finance, architecture, urban security, and the planning of new cities in the global south. He has taught critiqued and lectured on architecture and urban development at various institutions in Nigeria, the UK and the USA…including the University of Cambridge, and the University of California, Berkeley.