Meet the Team Behind the Initiative!
The Board of Directors
Wings to Fly Initiative

Panique mukirizo
Co-founder and Chief Executive Director
Mubikirizo Panique is the chairperson and co-founder of Wings to Fly Initiative – CBO, formerly known as Think With Me – Education.
He is a passionate and dedicated individual committed to improving the lives of marginalized people through education.
After completing his secondary education, Panique embarked on a journey in humanitarian services, where he taught young male and female refugees in secondary school at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.
Panique received teacher training at the HU-University of Applied Sciences of the Netherlands through UNHCR and Windle International Kenya. Additionally, he pursued training in Community Business Development through a partnership between Gonzaga University and JWL.
His expertise led him to work as a consultant and teacher trainer at the University of Maastricht, focusing on Sustainable Education for people in Crises and Emergency Situations in Ethiopia. He also collaborated with ICEFIL to assist the University of Camilo Jose Cela from Madrid and Windle International Kenya in training teachers in the Kakuma and Kalobei settlement camps. Panique’s extensive experience and knowledge in education and humanitarian work have made a significant impact on the lives of many individuals, especially those facing challenging circumstances.

Wanaye Bukashi
Co-founder and Office Administrator

Jayson Akilimali
Co-founder, Staff and Development Lead
Jayson is a dedicated and motivated refugee educator with over 8 years of experience in EdTech and education in emergency crisis contexts. He strongly believes that education is a fundamental human right and is essential for young people to thrive
During his time at the Kolibrifly, an EdTech program developed by Learning Equality, funded by Google.org and supported by the UNHCR connected learning, Jayson was a skilled Kolibri Expert and had the opportunity to work in the computer and E-learning offline platform industry. He facilitated, managed and redesigned learning through technology, and played a key role in training more than 300 high school teachers and educators on how to embrace and integrate ICT in education.
Apart from being part of a team that empowered hundreds of girls’ students through a series of EdTech bootcamps. He was also instrumental in contributing to the development of a set of tools that automate aspects of the curriculum alignment process, an exercise done remotely in Paris and in-person in San Francisco, USA in 2019. This development has benefited both the refugee and Open Educational Resource (OER) communities.
Jayson’s passion for education led him to join the dynamic and remote team of Amala as a facilitator in 2021, on the High School Diploma program. This opportunity gave him a sense of purpose and an urgent desire to serve, much like that of a rescue mission.
For the past 4 years, Jayson has been a team leader at Stepup.One, a social impact enterprise. He has followed a step-by-step approach to delivering real business impact for his clients, regardless of the size of their business or the audacity of their hope. He has helped drive pipelines and revenues through 1-to-1 social selling, and has also driven branding and thought leadership through 1-to-N social media marketing.
Jayson’s passion and dedication to serving humanity can be traced back to when he was just 17 years old. He joined the children’s parliament in his home town in Goma, north kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo to advocate for children’s rights and disseminate key policies on children’s rights, both internationally and locally.
As a co-founder of Thinkwithme-education, which has now become the Wings to Fly Initiative, Jayson has been volunteering as a staff and development lead. His role includes program development and planning, volunteer management, program monitoring and evaluation, community partnerships and networking, as well as reporting, communication, and outreach to ensure that the organization reaches its potential for growth and leaves the desired impact in its refugee community. A role which he is still remotely working on since despite having been resettled to Germany as a refugee in 2022.

Theogene Bitangimana
Co-founder
ABOUT
Wings to Fly Initiative is a refugee-led community-based organization that believes in the collective power of ideas of a community in order to hack the most fitting solutions to the most pressing issues within our communities and the humanitarian sector at large.