Aboubacar S Komara

A native of Guinea, Aboubacar Komara came to the United States in 2013, with the help of his extended family and community. At UC Berkeley, he studied architecture, focusing on providing housing for the world’s most vulnerable populations. Honoring the support that he received and that enabled him pursue a Berkeley degree, Komara founded Kaloum Bankhi in 2017, a sustainable housing project to help address housing related challenges in the area of Kaloum in Conakry, Guinea. After graduating in 2018 with his B.A.in Architecture, he returned to Guinea, teaming up with diverse stakeholders from UC Berkeley and beyond to scale and advance his project. For his innovative work in housing design, Komara has been honored with several awards, including the 2018 Alpha Rho Chi Medal, for which he was nominated by the architecture faculty at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, and first place in the 2018-19 Big Ideas contest, which celebrates students who tackle real-world social and environmental problems. Komara’ s other awards include the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize, the Fong and Chan Architects Scholarship, and the AIA SF Chapter Howard Friedman Scholarship. Previously, Komara worked as a project lead at the Guinean Ministry of Investment and Public Partnerships and last year was a member of the Guinean team participating in the Singapore-UN-Habitat International Leaders in Urban Governance Programme. Komara currently lives in the Bay Area and works at BDE Architecture. In his time off, he continues his work with Kaloum Bankhi with the help of a team in Guinea and in California.