Director & Founder
Dieter Brandt
Namibian-born Dieter Brandt graduated from the University of Cape Town, South Africa with distinction in 2002. He is a leading pan-African environmental and creative consultant and an experienced architect.
Dieter specializes in spatial sciences and creates places that are a provocation for African ecological futures. Such design provocation was key when he served as the lead designer for Freedom Park, South Africa in 2010, and the new Mathematical Sciences building at the University of Witwatersrand in 2014. He was also the lead design consultant for Mmabatho Precinct, a proposal for an original, public, shared-space precinct –part of the repositioning and rebranding of Mahikeng, the capital of North West province in 2016. Dieter’s design work includes the South African pavilion at the 10th International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2006. This work was further showcased at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London in 2007. Dieter is a director of MVS, whose focus is developing a global African cultural and economic accelerator for the creative industries and African film production. In 2017 Dieter founded Advanced Environmental Design Initiatives (AEDI) UG in Germany and South Africa. AEDI is an ecological and spatial advisory that develops fundable environmental projects that mediate selected technologies to advance and climate-proof complex adaptive systems within the water, energy, and food security nexus. Dieter serves as an advisor to the royal house of Queen Mother Naakye Dode Akabi IVX, Ghana, and consults select Pan African educational institutions in spatial strategies, environmental design and identity communication. Dieter has a special interest in carbon-neutral growth strategies that help initiatives to neutralize, or offset their emissions and reduce GHG emissions, incorporating this as part of new urban development strategies that facilitate social-ecological condensation, while developing theoretical positions on what African ecological futures will be in 2050.
Dieter is based in Berlin, Germany.
Email: dieter@aedi.africa
Mobile + 49 176 6566 9292 WhatsApp + 27 72 5911 752
Director & Co-Founder
Dr Jessica P. R. Thorn
Research associate in the Department of Environment and Geography, University of York
and, University of Cape Town. Namibian-born Jessica is a futurologist and complex systems analyst with a background in ecology and human geography. She holds a postdoc at Colorado State University and ETH Zurich, DPhil (University of Oxford), MSc Environmental Change and Management (University of Oxford), and BSocSci(Hons) (University of Cape Town). Over the last twelve years, she has been involved in various NSF, NERC, NRF, DFID, CGAIR, IDRC, World Bank and USAID funded projects, consulting and advising a wide range of stakeholders on climate, land use and development issues. Among these, include the UN International Strategy on Disaster Risk Reduction; Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre; Conservation International; World Wildlife Fund for Nature; CGIAR Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security; Centre for International Forestry Research; Kew Royal Botanical Gardens; Cambridge; Oxford; London School of Economics; Brown University; University of Cape Town; and the governments of South Africa, Kenya, Nepal and Ghana. She is currently working on an ESRC-funded collaborative capacity building project, using probabilistic social-ecological modelling and scenario analysis to measure potential impacts of Chinese foreign direct investment in transportation corridors in East Africa with the University of York. As an African Women in Climate Change Science fellow, she is also leading an IDRC-funded project predicting the synergies and trade-offs of ecological infrastructure in peri-urban areas in Tanzania and Namibia with the University of Cape Town. Country experience includes Kenya; Ghana; South Africa; Namibia; Peru; Argentina; Switzerland; UK; US; India; Nepal; Vietnam; Tanzania; Namibia; and Rwanda.
Email: jessica@aedi.africa
Mobile: +44 776 8883391 (UK) +264 81 682 7970 (NAM) +254 746 723 537 (KE) +255 752 623 394 (TZ)
Financial Director
Chiedza Ntuli
Chiedza Ntuli is a pan-African financial and auditing expert.
She has built a reputable financial management record across industries; services and manufacturing, retail and the public-social sectors. She has completed an Accounting Science degree and is currently an MBA candidate at the Gordon Institute of Business Science.
She is passionate about emerging and distinct businesses, to ensure they maximise their growth in African and global markets. She is the founder and Managing Director of Tanchi Consulting, an accounting firm, which works with entrepreneurs at all stages of their life cycles, from go-to-market, end to end productization and all-round financial sustainability.
Email: chiedza@aedi.africa
Tel: +27 10 312 5280 VOIP | Mobile: +27 76 345 3392
