Mondiant Dogon’s (MA ’19) Path from Refugee Camp to NYU Scholar Expanding Opportunity for Students

“I began writing poetry when I was 10 years old,” says Mondiant Dogon (MA ’19, International Education), smiling at the memory. Living in a refugee camp in Rwanda, Dogon recalls “there were no writing workshops, no shelves of books to study, no roadmap to publication.” But there was a United Nations program that invited children to contribute poems for World Refugee Day. 

Sometimes he won small prizes, like pens, books, or t-shirts. More importantly, he discovered that his voice could travel beyond the camp’s borders. “Growing up in a refugee camp, we didn’t have mentors. We were so disconnected from the outside world,” he says. Writing became a bridge to futures he couldn’t see yet. 

By 17, Dogon had graduated high school and became a teacher. “There weren’t many qualified teachers who could go past a certain level in education,” he says. “So I stepped in to fill some of the gaps where I could.” He taught chemistry, physics, English, and French, sometimes to classrooms with more than 100 students. The rooms were crowded, the resources thin. But education, he believed, was the surest way forward. 

Outside the classroom, he noticed something else missing—a space for people to speak about what they carried. He began collecting anonymous stories from fellow refugees, accounts of war, displacement, violence, and survival.

“I wanted to help people heal through telling their stories,” he says. “Making their invisible pain visible.” That storytelling effort grew into Seed of Hope, an initiative that later provided small grants to vulnerable women, many of them single mothers, to start businesses inside the camps. The format shifted from storytelling to microgrants, moving the philosophy forward from healing to hope, expressed through opportunity.

While studying at the University of Rwanda, the opportunity arose to attend NYU Steinhardt with a full scholarship. “I arrived in New York City on August 7, 2017, and I remember what a big shock it was for me,” says Dogon wide-eyed, recalling his transition to a big city. “I came a month early so that I could learn city things, like riding the subway.” Living in Palladium, he enjoyed all that the city had to offer, from cheeseburgers to nature walks in Central Park and people watching in Washington Square Park. 

“At the same time, I was very aware of my family that I left behind.” While he studied global education systems and program design, friends back home were graduating high school with no path to university. Refugee status, financial barriers, and a lack of networks closed doors before they could even knock.

Then he met Claude, a refugee who kickstarted Dogon’s idea for the Mondiant Initiative. “He actually became the first student to receive a scholarship through the program,” Dogon says. That scholarship marked the beginning of the Mondiant Initiative, the refugee-led nonprofit Dogon founded to expand access to higher education for displaced youth.

Today, the Mondiant Initiative supports 67 students across six African countries. Scholars receive comprehensive financial support—tuition, housing, transportation—along with leadership training and internships. The organization also runs a Leadership Academy open to refugee students beyond its scholarship recipients.

“We realized scholarships alone are not enough,” Dogon says. “Students need skills. They need networks. They need people who follow up.”

He has watched students move from refugee camps to universities like Carnegie Mellon Africa and the African Leadership University. One now leads accounting operations within Mondiant’s growing social enterprise.