Meet our ELP-Fellow

Divin-Luc Bikubanya

UCSIA welcomes Divin-Luc Bikubanya who joins the team for the coming year as a Fellow of the European Leadership Programme. UCSIA has been supporting the programme for the past 5 years by organizing the biannual paper presentation jury for the fellows at the University of Antwerp and supporting the organization of a graduation ceremony in Brussels. Since last year we also offer a fellowship to an ELP candidate. This year we offer a work experience in joint collaboration with USOS, the University Foundation for Development Cooperation, for a Fellow from the South.

Divin-Luc Bikubanya is a citizen of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was born in the province of South Kivu, in the city of Bukavu, in the Eastern part of the country, which has been known for massacres and wars for three decades now. It is in this environment that he grew up, pursuing his university studies at the Catholic University of Bukavu (UCB, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in 2017) in the field of Rural Economy.

With this background, he first engaged in research in the mining sector by joining the Centre d’Expertise en Gestion Minière (CEGEMI) of the UCB in 2018, which predisposed him to pursue, in 2020, a master’s degree at the Institute for Development Policy of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, where he graduated in September 2021. He specialized in the field of Globalisation and Development, discussing for his master’s dissertation decent work conditions in the mines in the East of his country, that have become the focus of scientific research.

By joining the European Leadership Programme (ELP) he aims to enrich his knowledge on issues of social economy and social justice because he believes that these issues are often the thorny problem that plagues the mining sector globally. An international framework such as the one offered by the ELP will benefit him more than ever in this sense.

You can meet Divin-Luc at the event organizes by USOS and 11.11.11 in De Cinema in Antwerp on May 4th (start at 19h30) where he will share his insights in a panel debate following the screening of ‘L’empire du silence’ of Thierry Michel. For detailed information and registration see here.