Team

Rabbi Bofotera

Co-Founder & Director of Football

Rabbi Bofotera knows the African football academy pathway from the inside, because he lived it. Born in the DRC, he came up through the Congolese academy system as a young player before continuing his development in Nigeria's football academies, the West African pipeline that has produced generations of players for European clubs. He has seen firsthand where the Congolese system loses its talent, and what successful academies do differently. In 2024 he earned his Canada Soccer Coaching Licence and joined OSU Academy as a coach, developing young players on and off the field, giving him the full pathway as player, coach, and mentor. Based in Canada for the past 15 years, Rabbi has built a career in customer service and communications, sharpening the people skills that run through everything he does. He also earned a Power Pilot Scholarship through the Air Cadet League of Canada, completing advanced flight training toward a Transport Canada pilot licence, a mark of the discipline and focus he brings to the academy. Combining lived experience in African football, a Canadian coaching credential, and a commitment to youth development, he carries the diaspora perspective at the heart of MWINDA: connecting African talent to world-class opportunity while strengthening the game back home.

Vincent Bolamba

Co-Founder & Managing Director, MwindaTV

Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and based in Canada, Vincent Bolamba has spent 25 years producing, engineering, and developing talent at the top of francophone and African music. His production credits include gold records with Canadian stars Massari and Belly, work with French rap icon Youssoupha and the legendary Congolese collective Bisso Na Bisso, and early records that helped lay the groundwork for the Afro Trap sound. He has built and run his own recording studio, founded two labels developing emerging artists, produced tours for artists including Booba, La Fouine, and Trey Songz, composed for networks including HBO, and now pioneers AI-driven music video production. That range is what sets him apart. He plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, and percussion, produces and arranges, writes and directs choir arrangements, serves as musical director on tour, and engineers a record end to end, from the first take through mixing and mastering. Most professionals do one of those things and a studio assembles five people to cover them all; MwindaTV's content operation begins with one. His career has connected Congolese music to the world, which is precisely MwindaTV's mission.

Alex Gordon

Executive Chairman & Chief Technology Officer

Alex Gordon has spent over three decades building and running businesses where talent, media, and physical spaces meet. He began in architecture, spending seven years as a draughtsman at two firms designing residential and community buildings. He graduated in Audio Engineering from OIART, the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology, and went on to design, build, and operate his own recording studio for nine years before founding a music management company he has led for over 26 years and still runs today, representing A-list artists in partnership with Live Nation, the largest live entertainment company in the world. A hands-on technologist, he builds daily with modern software and AI, and leads the project's technology direction, from the streaming platform architecture to the systems that run the campus. The MWINDA model, an academy that develops talent, a studio that produces content, and a media company that distributes it, is the playbook he has run his entire career, now at continental scale.

Veronique Kashala

Chief Executive Officer

Veronique Kashala is MWINDA's presence on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and she has done this exact job before. Born in the DRC and raised in Germany, she returned home and built her career as a consultant bridging international investors and the Congolese government, and coordinated a large-scale hospital housing project between German investors and the DRC government: the same shape of undertaking as MWINDA, foreign capital, government cooperation, and a major build. She serves as a Tourism Ambassador for the Democratic Republic of Congo, and as National Coordinator of Miss DRC under a mandate from the Ministry of Tourism, holding the national franchise and reviving the pageant as a nationwide platform across government, sponsors, and media. She organized the DRC's Mobile Sports and Cultural Tourism Embassy at the FIFA World Cup 2026, a Ministry of Tourism initiative to showcase the country on the global stage. As President of the Fondation UMUE, she leads work across health, education, child protection, women's empowerment, and disaster relief, giving the project deep roots in the communities it will serve. In the DRC, a project must hold the confidence of two authorities at once: the formal one, from the ministries in Kinshasa to the provincial administration in Muanda, and the traditional one, the local chiefs whose customary blessing no permit can replace. Maintaining both is a rare skill, and it is exactly hers.

Peter Peyechu

Chief Operating Officer

Born in the DRC and raised in the United States from childhood, Peter Peyechu is an entrepreneur who has built and runs multiple successful businesses in the US. He brings the operator's perspective of someone who has started, grown, and managed companies in the world's most competitive market, paired with the diaspora connection to home that defines the MWINDA project.

Guisiane Elphenor

Director of Finance & Planning

Guisiane Elphenor has spent over a decade inside the financial machinery of the Canadian federal government, where budgets are defended line by line and every payment has to withstand audit. At Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada she is the finance business partner to senior managers: building the budgets, running the forecasts, explaining the variances, and turning financial data into decisions people can act on. Before that she worked in payment verification and expenditure compliance at Global Affairs Canada, reconciling transactions and testing them against the rules. She holds a business administration degree with a finance concentration from the Universite du Quebec en Outaouais, works in French and English, and is fluent in SAP and Excel to the level the work demands. For a project being built in the DRC, the question investors ask first is not how much revenue is forecast, it is who is watching the money. Guisiane brings the discipline of an institution where that question is answered every single year.

Emmanuel Bolamba

Director of Basketball

Raised in Canada within a Congolese family, Emmanuel Bolamba developed through the country's renowned basketball system, the pipeline that has produced more NBA talent than any country outside the United States, much of it the children of African immigrants. He began playing competitively at 13 and advanced through the Canadian development pathway to the collegiate level, winning a high school championship, ranking among the top players in his graduating class in his city, and earning college Rookie of the Year honors. Having come through the system himself, he knows the coaching standards, player development pathways, and organizational structures behind its success, and those principles are the foundation of MWINDA's basketball academy: bringing the best of Canada's development model to Muanda so young athletes can reach their full potential on and off the court. Beyond basketball, Emmanuel has built a career in futures trading, developing the discipline, patience, and risk management the financial markets demand. He has also traded equity options and invested in public companies, learning to analyze a business through its earnings, balance sheet, cash flow, and long-term fundamentals. That same analytical, disciplined perspective is what he brings to MWINDA's financial operations.

Samuel Atana

Director of Tennis

Born to a Congolese family, Samuel Atana came up through Geneva's elite tennis pathway, the same high-performance pipeline that produces Switzerland's national players. He competed at the Swiss National Championships, represented at Junior Davis Cup level, and reached a best national ranking of N4. His development took him to the United States, to the Club Med Academy in Port St. Lucie, Florida, and into intensive training with Team Daniel Contet alongside a former international, before he competed on the professional ATP circuit. Based in Switzerland and coaching independently since 2022, he develops players of every level, from beginner to competition, in French, German, and English. He brings the standards, technique, and mentality of the European elite game to MWINDA's tennis program in Muanda, and the lived proof that a child of the Congolese diaspora can reach the world stage.

Andrea Barbieri

Creative Director

Born in Como, Italy, and based in Tuscany, Andrea Barbieri trained in computer animation at the IED academy in Milan and the ICARI Institute in Montreal before joining the visual design team at Corriere della Sera, Italy's best-selling newspaper. In a career spanning three decades he has refused to be boxed into a single role: a web designer at the height of the 2000s Internet boom, handling both the visual identity and the code of the sites he produced, then art director at a book publishing house, and most recently a magazine designer for scientific and cultural institutions. That range, from national news pages to animation to publishing to digital, is exactly what MWINDA's visual world demands: one creative eye across the MwindaTV brand, the academy's identity, and everything in between.

Key Hires Funded by This Raise

The raise budgets the senior specialists the plan commits to from day one:

Advisory Board

In formation. Seats in finance, streaming, sport, and DRC public affairs will be announced.